It's not for you! It's for the building

The book is published on the occasion of the Latvian Pavilion at the 17th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia in 2021.

2

NRJA (No Rules Just Architecture) is one of the leading architecture studios in Latvia. While small in size, they are a strong team of like-minded outsiders. Their practice strives for honesty and clarity in materiality, technique and thought, even if this is occasionally achieved at the expense of politeness. NRJA’s relationship with technology mirrors the experiences described in this book: while technology is certainly an everyday necessity and can nowadays be considered an extension of ourselves, it also brings ambivalence, suspicion and caution, fuelled by big data, unpredictable algorithms and self-serving progress.

The team. NRJA

Inga

Ivars

Elīna

Austra

Līga

Ieva

Uldis

Zigmārs

3

4

Levelup is a research-based strategic consultancy founded in Riga by Olga Procevska, Katya Firyan and Igors Gubenko. Motivated by purpose-driven curiosity, they help their clients to build strong brands, create effective communication strategies, understand their audiences, articulate their ethical responsibilities.

Olga, Katya and Igors think that this is the best — ​if not the last possible — ​moment to clarify humans’ relations with technology. After all, the very distinction between humans and machines could disappear at any moment. While it still hasn’t, the Levelup team is watching how people are learning to live together with the smart assistants they have created. As testified by this book, the success rate is mixed.

Alexey Murashko started his career in the 90s as a digital designer once ultimately turned to paper mediums. He realized the potential of the smart appliances when the award-winning motion-sensorpowered office lamp in front of him constantly turned off while just the computer mouse was moving around (manufacturer’s support replied that the sensor could be disabled in the new version of the device). He is still fighting planned obsolescence by obtaining and stocking the discontinued iPods and Nokia button phones of the very same model thus often considered a hipster. Received his first smartphone as a present from his boss unable to send him memes in WhatsApp. The gift, however, significantly improved his dating score.

The team. Levelup +

Igors

Olga

Katya

Alexey

5

6

Foreword

How will we live together with the machine?

The purpose of technology is to make our lives better. As smart machines are becoming part and parcel of today’s architecture, they are taking their users’ comfort and wellbeing to a whole new level. Not to mention that technology is our main ally in the fight against our carbon footprint and climate change.

However, in this book, we have decided to put techno-optimism on pause and take a look at the darker side of modern technology. Why, you may ask, if all the pros are on the tech side? Our aim is utterly constructive — ​​not to criticize technology just for the sake of it, but to highlight the tensions arising in how users of architecture interact with machines. By ignoring these tensions, we not only undermine the positive goals of technology, but also act against our own long-term good.

Windows that cannot be opened; smart systems fooled by hungry animals; buildings that are no longer mere spaces, but increasingly resemble services provided to the dwellers — ​​these are just some uncanny effects of technological development that many people today experience as alienating and dehumanizing.

While from the outside it may seem that negative experiences with architecture technology are mostly rooted in distorted and exaggerated perceptions on the part of the users, this psychological reality cannot be ignored — ​​especially during the pandemic, when people have had to spend more than 90 % of their time indoors. Psychological resistance to change is a real factor of user discomfort that must be seriously addressed by leaders and managers of technological change.

The international team of authors gathered in this book is anything but an affinity group. While some of them stress the negative side effects of technology, others argue that any such problems are accidental in character and have rational solutions — ​​you just have to find them. While stories inspired by real or fictional events reveal instances of technological nonsense with a light touch of humor, the experts’ explanatory comments mostly suggest implementable solutions.

In the texts, people’s discontent with technology is considered from various points of view: as alienation from machine-laden spaces and anxiety about loss of control; as uncertainty regarding the expansion of technological agency; as the absurd consequences of technological glitches; and as clumsy takes at adapting old buildings to new

{1}

See further, p. 154.

{2}

See further, p. 20.

7

How will we live together with the machine?

requirements. In contrast, experts offer arguments as to why the user experience of architecture actually benefits from technological solutions. The book thus reflects the polarization of society at large towards the machine. Moreover, these conflicting attitudes can coexist within a single individual.

We have performatively enacted modern technology’s ambivalent nature in the interactive installation in the Latvian Pavilion at the Biennale Architettura.{1} The title “It’s not for you! It’s for the building”, inspired by Peter Trummer,{2} aptly captures the tension between humans and machines typical of contemporary architecture. However, on closer look, the title reveals a double misunderstanding.

The truth is not on the side of the techno-optimistic engineer who, in saying these words, declares the sovereign character of technology and implicitly denies that user comfort is a legitimate goal of the building’s existence. Neither is the truth, however, on the side of the techno-pessimistic user outraged by the neglect of his comfort privileges and seemingly blind to the fact that energy efficiency is the long-term condition of that very comfort.

Does the ambivalent nature of technology that we have tried to emphasize in this book mark a new paradigm in the history of architecture? Are we really entering an era of posthuman architecture, where user comfort will be subordinated to sustainability requirements?

We believe that architecture is and will be humane as long as it is inhabited by humans. Technology will remain an integral part of human life, and man will continue to be a creator of artificial solutions because that’s what we’ve always been. It is crucial for contemporary architecture that humans learn to live together with the machine and, in a common struggle against the ecological crisis, ensure that any solution that is “for the building” is ultimately “for you”.

i av

d

OUR SHITTY BOYFRIEND H

an m ey

n 8

David Heymann, FAIA, is an architect, and the Harwell Hamilton Harris Regents Professor at The University of Texas at Austin. His work examines complex relationships of constructions and landscapes.

Heymann is a contributing writer for Places Journal, author of My Beautiful City Austin and of the forthcoming John S. Chase — The Chase Residence.

At an environmental conference in the U.S. some years ago, I heard then-Governor of California Arnold Schwarzenegger argue that new environmental technologies had to be made sexy in order for sustainability to succeed.

It was perhaps an unfortunate choice of term. Schwarzenegger’s virtue rested on his status as a conservative politician more committed to environmental safeguards than many liberals. But various self-inflicted sex-related scandals — ​sexual harassment, disputed paternity — ​engulfed him like hot liquid metal shortly thereafter. {1} By “succeed”, Schwarzenegger meant to succeed in the market economy. This is hardly a divisive stance in the West. Is anyone, of any political stripe, advancing the lurking alternative, that limiting everyone’s freedoms through centralised political control is the only effective way to combat our environmental catastrophe, given its dimensions? No. Here’s the thing, though. We know the market, with its hopelessly implicated past, is a shitty boyfriend, unwilling to compromise its own self-interest in favour of our future together as a family. We know it will inevitably let us down. Yet that’s where we pin our collective aspirations, praying necessary growth might mature through less-stupid growth (where our relationship now seems stalled) into smart growth. A risky commitment! It may end up only generating tales of abandonment, not happiness — ​as the stories and essays in this volume suggest.

You may believe as I do that, {1} Newsweek’s 2007 Global beyond its other crucial concerns, susEnvironmental Leadership Conference at Georgetown tainability arises at cross-purposes to the University. Schwarzenegger claimed that, before market, as a fundamental technological him, bodybuilding had been revolution, not as a form of technology “weird scary guys lifting weights in a moldy basethat is developing from the market’s own ment”; after his rise it was a global force. He argued interests. It follows that the technoloenvironmentalism needed to gies of sustainability should, within a make the same transition.

9

Our shitty boyfriend

“I’m from a tiring generation. Having conquered the tedium of a low-tech youth either by playing outside or through a sort of bored tinkering we in retrospect valourise as creative invention, we bemoan to others the dangers of technological takeover (unless we have a medical emergency). My office builds digital models, for example, but mostly to spew out printed views I can iterate over in pencil. Yet my screen time on average goes up every week, month on month. So, I think you can fairly describe my relationship with technology as fraught with hypocrisy. As I said, I’m from a tiring generation.”

10

David Heymann

generation or two, prompt an aesthetic and cultural revolution (it’s rarely clear which comes first) as has regularly been the case with similar developments in history. But our private dream, which we secretly hold up each day in hope, is that somehow the market will accommodate this revolution. {2} Sexy still rules the market. The degree of salaciousness demanded may heat and cool, but sexy rules. I don’t mean sexy explicitly, like buildings that moan. I mean ineffably desirable enough to override rational objections, like the ones you suppress about the environmental impact of your sexy iPhone. That’s how Schwarzenegger seemed to mean it as well. His example of sexy was his own car, a Hummer (the U.S. army vehicle, not the commercial version) he’d had refitted to run on bio-fuel. He described it as the most beautiful car, and said that driving it, in its born-again state, was an aesthetic experience.

The intended shock was not lost on all in the audience. Preaching to the already caring is, after all, the gated cul-de-sac where environmentalism goes to die.

Schwarzenegger’s argument favoured the influential action of aesthetic experience to influence action among those who do not care. I agree. Inclusivity includes including assholes who intentionally refuse to listen to reason. They remain the ultimate stumbling block to the realization of idealistic environmental dreams that preserve the market freedoms we’re loath to sacrifice.

For Schwarzenegger, aesthetic experience was a powerful agent of change. Sexy was the most effective trigger of aesthetic experience. Can desirable artifacts — ​and the world of experience they frame and alter — ​change the religion of non-believers, or of denialists? That, to be blunt, is the hope designers committed to both environment and the market have to pin their (our) best future on. Though environmentally conscious architects frequently argue aesthetics must be back-burnered if architecture is to save the planet — ​David Lake, FAIA yelled at me about this kind of tough love at another conference — ​I believe aesthetics remain the most effective arena where {2} A related example of a brilliant, indirect environmenarchitects can actually add. tal solution that avoids form Because all the technical things entirely is New York City giving inhabitants low flush replacea new building can and should do just to ment toilets free, rather than building another underground resolve the problems it in itself generaqueduct to meet increasates are not remotely enough, really. ing demand. The amount of water saved offset the I’m not saying it’s not important to try amount of water that would have needed to be delivered, to do more (though few buildings can and at far less financial or resolve the triple bottom line as it is); environmental cost.

11

Our shitty boyfriend

I’m just pointing out that most buildings can only play small roles, often at a distance, in ameliorating long-standing environmental problems — ​habitat fragmentation, for example — ​ which are not necessarily of their own making, but to which each is still another small blow.

The relationship of ends to means in sustainable architectural design can be nicely summarised: it’s like killing an elephant with cotton balls. Every cotton ball counts, every throw counts — ​even the ones that miss. Eventually the beast must fall! If faith is lost in that eventuality, however, the long effort becomes devoid of power. It’s easily lost: each action (each design) is so silly, each weapon (each insignificant building) is so inane, and each impact is so imperceptible. Really, it’s embarrassing. Thank God our culture — ​bless you, social media — ​has become expert at making inconsequential activities attractive.

My favorite concrete example of faith renewal in cotton balls is the Otohime — ​the Sound Princess — ​a wallmounted box-shaped digital device invented by Toto, a Japanese manufacturer of ceramic plumbing fixtures and related technology (including, famously, the washlet, the cleansing jet synonymous with “Japanese toilet”). The Sound Princess broadcasts the digitally created sound of running water, or of a flushing toilet, when you push a button. It appeared on the market in the 1980s to address a specific form of environmental crisis in Japan: rampant water wastage.

In traditional Japanese culture, other people hearing you urinating is personally embarrassing, in particular — ​according to various articles — ​for women. It was not uncommon for many women and some men, upon entering toilets, to flush continuously (or too often) to create a sonic cover. This activity increased exponentially as more flush toilets were put into Japanese buildings. The carbon (and infrastructural) cost of the wasted clean water was phenomenal. An educational campaign fell short. People did not feel bad enough. But, still, pretty bad: The Sound Princess caught on quickly. Now almost every house (and office, public building and restaurant) has one in each bathroom.

The Sound Princess was not perhaps designed to be sexy, but oddly it became so. My son lived with several Japanese families in Osaka in the 1990s as a high school exchange student. Teenagers he knew had learned to use the Sound Princess to evolved ends. Seeking to obtain privacy at home, either alone or as couples, they would activate the flush sound to warn away anyone approaching. He mentioned teenagers would often stay in the bathroom that way for hours.

12

David Heymann

Aside from saving unimaginable amounts of fresh water, that flushing sound, one imagines, will have conditioned some intriguing Pavlovian responses.

Of course, sexy in terms of the aesthetic experience of buildings is different than sexy in the experience of most other things, and sustainable sexy is even more so. The latter might not mean voluptuous. That fantasy of sexiness has been around architecture now for a while, and pre-dates the rise of sustainable desire. Its strong forms — ​from the testicular sack of the Kunsthaus Graz to the kinky ETFE bondage of the Shed — ​are probably more fundamentally driven by a need to give some organisation to the otherwise impossibleto-manage physical context of the late-capitalist city. Think of those buildings as beautifully suggestive vases giving order to very messy rooms. It’s not that such forms cannot be made to perform environmentally, but that for them to do so is conceptually a retrofit, a validation akin to noting that a porn star is studying for a PhD in physics.

The aesthetic consequences of technical revolutions take time to figure out. And for sustainable technology they are going to take an even longer time. Sustainable architecture is given its primary value by invisible environmental performances. These are hard to embed into form, as most sustainable products and technology have no explicit formal consequences architecturally. Sustainably farmed lumber is identical to its pirated equivalent from some threatened rainforest. Carbon-absorbing concrete looks just like all other concrete. Those buried geothermal heat-pump lines present themselves to you with the same damn thermostat.

The plug fed by the field of solar panels (out there, somewhere) is exactly the same as the one fed by the coal plant.

The paradigm shift will not be from one form to another.

This is unlike earlier aesthetic/cultural revolutions prompted by revolutionary technological developments: the discovery of the arch, of concrete, of the continuous frame; or the development of the steel beam, of large sheet glass, of air conditioning; and so on. Each of these had world-changing consequences for plastic form.

So what does sustainable form mean? Not much, really. Consider the Sound Princess. The (sexy) aesthetic experience arising from its excellent and measurable environmental performance (water saved) is triggered invisibly — ​by a flushing sound — ​rather than by form, or rather only indirectly by form (the button on the box). If a sustainable revolution in use is what we want — ​and architecture is the means by which we want to get there — ​the formal

apprehension of form is not likely going to be its primary agent (hence the possibility we are entering the Post-Form Era). How do we embed invisible triggers of sexy sustainable aesthetic experience into form without relying on frustrating non-spatial mediation — ​like needing the bio-fuel usage of that Hummer explained? How do we avoid a preachy and extremely unsexy didacticism? The Sound Princess may not exactly be the way — ​there’s not enough form there to keep architects alive! — ​but its brilliant indirectness is perhaps closer to a solution than, say, the Seed Cathedral. {3}

13

This is something I’ve been thinking about for a while. Twenty years ago, I designed a high-environmentalperformance house (off the grid, low embodied carbon) that was potentially market-friendly — ​built to the greatest extent possible with “normal” construction techniques and materials — ​in a south-western state of the U.S., for a politically conservative client. And it was built. For cross ventilation and passive solar loading, the house is one room wide. Each room has outside doors on both the north and south sides: double French doors, set into banks of operable windows, all steel and glass. The rooms are set in a 6 × 50 meter-long segmented arc, with breezeways between the blocks of sideby-side rooms.

This means everyone using the house has to walk outside to get from one room to another, for example from kitchen to bedroom, or living room to bathroom. This is accommodated by a continuous porch that rings the rooms under the deep overhang of a cantilevered (i.e. column-free) roof. The soffit of the overhang extends the drip line of massive, adjacent oak trees that shade the house from sun from the west. Those trees had to be there to get the heat loads down to manageable levels — ​and the overhang was {3} It may be that the paranecessary to get enough sun off the glass digm of technical/aesthetic/ windows/doors — ​given what was generally cultural revolutions following one after another may be available then in terms of insulated glass, dead, since the late capitalist market — ​and architectural and the amount of energy we could generpractice within it — ​uses the ate to heat or cool the building. appearance of revolution as a sales tool, like an empty Despite the strangeness of its promise: “really, honey, I’ve changed”. But even if you layout — ​the length, the column-less believe the market has funporch, the forever having to go outdamentally undermined that trajectory, the paradigm still side — ​the house is relatively unassuming holds, perversely: the new devil’s bargain requires you in appearance, not really like archito accept such market prottecture, if you know what I mean. The estations as fact.

Our shitty boyfriend

○○○

14

David Heymann

architectural language is normative: a pitched roof, vertically proportioned window/doors, local stone. The formal decisions are also systematic — ​the window/doors, for example, are centered on each room. There is no sudden architectural cry for help. The building relates to the other objects in the rural surrounding landscape, none of which look remotely alike, through this underlying logic, rather than through its actual appearance. So that part: not so sexy.

Regarding aesthetic experience, the house relies on a series of invisible triggers (those aforementioned), each activated by some natural event, which re-frame inhabitation, bending the mind to the environment. For example, the rainwater from the roof is collected along the full perimeter of the house in a gravel-filled gutter set flush with the ground immediately adjacent to the porch (instead of a gutter at the edge of the roof). You don’t notice this gutter when it’s dry. When it rains, the long parts of the porch become tunnels and the end parts become rooms, one of which has an immense fireplace — ​the outer walls of which are formed by water sheeting off the cantilevered roof. The possibility of rain forming those rooms — ​you want to stay outside when it rains — ​is why the porch had to be column-free. The transformation from normal to sexy is, well, sexy.

Unfortunately, unfortunate events made it impossible to publish that house. I think it would have helped nudge some climate-change deniers in the right direction.

Cut to the present. I recently completed a freestanding painting studio next to that house. It’s a minimalist sky-lit stone box as baldly exposed to the elements as any pre-eco energy guzzler. Yet its environmental performance is stunning. Its backsliding aesthetic impulse — ​sexy Modernist form! — ​is made possible by the recent development of superbly insulated multi-layered glass panels and better overall insulation. This allows the building’s form to avoid acknowledging the same environmental factors from which the original house derived the triggering of aesthetic experience for people dwelling there. The inhabitation of the studio’s space is elegant enough, but as it arises from a familiar formal effort, it’s predictable and not particularly sexy. It just goes through the motions.

I mostly blame our shitty boyfriend for this frustrating step backwards, this insistence on staying mired in the past. The new sustainable technology leaves form without weaknesses! It certainly isn’t driven by a powerful market desire to appear technological, or appear technologically advanced with regard to environmental performance, or to

appear at all. You will often hear architects assume it should, but that trope is a hangover from the Modern. Form is driven by other factors. Still, I think it’s fair to say whatever product the market offers — ​at least anything that will be regularly seen — ​is directly related to the definition of sexiness, since the bottom line remains choice driven by desire.

15

To return to plumbing, and Toto, a strange example of default market sexy is the toilet skirt. Toilet skirts became popular in the U.S. following the arrival of low-flush toilets in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s (a step towards sustainable performance in buildings, and now mandated by most construction codes). One of the earliest low-flush toilets to succeed in the U.S. was made by Toto. Its engineers were first to master the geometry required in order for less water to generate the necessary thrust. This necessitated a wider trapway in the bowl, and a revised layout of the trap-forming waste pipe you see on the outside of the fixture behind the bowl.

Toto’s early low-flush toilets had by default a new expression of this pumped-up passage, more muscular when compared with older toilets. Here was less-stupid technology presented like the ripped biceps of a body builder, an evolved aesthetic form based on familiar Modernist means. T ­ hose toilets may not be conventionally beautiful: the transition from generic front to gastroenteric back is shocking. But — ​ as in ancient Greece, with the first peripteral temples that started the long line of evolution towards the Parthenon — ​you sense the beauty is coming. I put some in that original house.

Toilet skirts soon appeared. A toilet skirt wraps around the back of the fixture, giving the mass a simple, unified volumetric appearance by masking those intestine-like waste pipes. The first ones I saw were plastic. Then fully skirted low-flush toilets arrived. Each has an added layer of ceramic material, hiding the necessarily technological space of waste from the acculturated space of the room. The additional clay and airspace required complicated the shaping of the unit and the fine tolerances during the firing process, adding cost. But cost be damned! All the toilets I’ve had to spec for residential projects since have been skirted. There’s a skirted toilet in that new studio. My clients, of all persuasions, insist on them.

You would think the reason for this is that skirted toilets are easier to clean. To my knowledge, though, all my clients have someone else clean their bathrooms. And when

Our shitty boyfriend

○○○

16

David Heymann

we’ve talked about it — ​and we have, because I was trying to figure out new aesthetic possibilities — ​it’s not about cleanliness. That porcelain intestine just makes them uncomfortable. Waste processing? Maybe everyone today should understand how it happens, and be reminded of it regularly.

But not in my bathroom, y’all. {4} This anecdotal observation reiterates the dead end I mentioned earlier. Future sustainable technology does not seem like it will appear more evidently technological, or more didactic, in order to be sexy. I mention didactic because the assumption that sustainable architecture must teach is ingrained in environmental design culture. Your building gets LEED points for imparting lessons, for example. That first toilet taught. But teaching like that is, I guess, preaching to the choir. We’re worried about the people skipping the ceremony. They want sexy.

It is fair to say the design of the studio — ​and the skirted toilet — ​is driven by nostalgia. That has its own powerful attraction right now, which makes sense, architectural-historically. Every technological/cultural/aesthetic revolution has a first generation of practitioners for whom new technologies are just used to resolve old desires. There are many examples. The most familiar might be how long it took to figure out what a steel frame might mean to architecture: the first generation or two of adopters used the technology to make better masonry piles. You can see that first-gen nostalgia right now in the slavish architectural obsession with mid-century Modernism, which architects congratulate themselves for approaching with ipe, triple-glazing, fly-ash-entrained concrete and (skirted, i.e., streamlined) low-flush toilets. Sexy like that isn’t a future though. It’s really just dreaming about your lusty but now long-vanished youth. The Modern masters got to use single glazing: today that’s just not safe enough.

I think you can draw a more meaningful conclusion about that studio building — ​and, to a degree, the skirted toilet — ​and about the house imagined in my story “Net Zero” (which appears later in this volume). Each of them is essentially a prophylactic. The rise of prophylactic interiority is, for me, a critical hallmark of the architecture of the last twenty years, and the agenda of sustain{4} [not in my bathroom, y’all: NIMBY] In the early 1990s the able technology and its definition of architects Bruce Tomb and sexy. Everywhere in the world, the new John Randolph did a series of projects in the San Francisco architectural volume is frequently — ​and area with exposed, flexible waste lines. The movement of this is always a surprise to me — ​all or those lines when people used mostly all glass, little of which actually the fixtures was shocking.

{5} The prophylactic is invariably set in the pastoral.

This vision appears in almost every architectural rendering of almost every “sustainable” building designed for almost anywhere on earth today.

These are not Machines in Gardens. The machine is wrapped for safety, and the garden is an open field of, mostly, tall grasses, or at least a planter box of native flora.

The architectural rendering will have a chart of the birds attracted, though most will be killed flying into the glass.

The often propagandistic but biologically ineffectual use of native flora is well-intended, but a misleading diversion.

I think it’s useful to think of those limited plantings not as a solution, but as a language, one that states a profound desire, much as the triglyphs and metopes of classical architecture boast of their relationship to a once extant form of exalted construction.

Those native plants speak in a coded syntax (like a bumper sticker): I Care About the Environment, with the implied addendum: So You Need to Do More. And if actions speak louder than words, words still mean something, even if only to announce intent by decorative bleating — ​though such bleating is perhaps not the sexiest way to start a conversation.

17

Our shitty boyfriend

opens. Unlike in Modern architecture, the curtain walls are now detailed to minimise frames, pushing the glass out to maximise the prophylactic layer separating exterior and interior. {5} Or, if not a glass box, there is still the telling detail of prophylactic interiority worldwide: the steel box bay window projected out from the mass, the glass plane pushed out to the very edge of that box, extending conditioned space by cantilevering the weight of the window beyond the building’s structure into the void — ​the natural world! — ​like a butt implant.

You could say these objects are separated from the vagaries of the world to the extent required to avoid risk, but the truth is they avoid commitment. The market and the environment? They’re just friends with benefits — ​though the benefits really only accrue to one side. After years of hoping for the promise of a better life, our shitty boyfriend has just given us a prophylactic. Maybe that’s a good thing: the sun and the sky are no longer safe. But anyone sane, looking on without passion, would correctly say that this relationship is ripe for an intervention.

19

{1}

ARCHITECTURE IN THE AGE OF HYPEROBJECTS

er et

u Tr

m m

er

20

Peter Trummer is Professor for Urban Design & Urban Planning and Head of the Institute for Urban Design at the University of Innsbruck. He is currently Visiting Professor for Architecture and Architectural Theory at the SCI-Arc in Los Angeles and Guest Professor at the Städelschule In Frankfurt. He established his own practice as an architect, researcher and educator in 2001. He is currently working on a book The City as the Author of Architecture. Peter exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 2006 and 2012, and presented his recent work on Hyper-Cities at the Seoul Biennale 2019.

From my office on the third floor of the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Innsbruck, I have, or had, a great view of the Alps. The building is on the campus of the Technical University, which was built in the 1960s by the Austrian architects Hubert Prachensky and Ernst Heiss. The design of the campus was clearly influenced by Team X, as it features a megastructure with a large, longitudinal pedestrian strip to which each faculty building is attached. The library and the administration buildings create a public square in the middle of this pedestrian infrastructure. The campus was built at a time when architects attempted to make modernism social, or better, tried to support the idea of a new post-war democratic and academic collective of knowledge in a country that, for the most part, did not acknowledge its National Socialist past. The entrance to the architecture building symbolises this search for a new democratic collective: there is no central door, as is typical of 1930s institutional buildings; instead, the architects created entrances to either side of the front facade, one on the left and one on the right. The centre is empty. Each time you enter the building you must make a choice.

The Architecture Building is loosely based on Le Corbusier’s Maison Dom-Ino: open floor plans with a staircase in the middle, a free-hanging prefabricated facade and horizontal ribbon windows. There is also a Miesian element in the campus design: all the structural pilotis of the university buildings are aligned on an invisible 7.5-by-7.5-metre grid that runs through all of the buildings and public areas, uniting the campus in a way similar to the Illinois Institute of Technology campus in Chicago. Every element of the Innsbruck campus is a manifestation of a strong belief in democratic values and knowledge. Overall, it represents, more than any work of architecture I know, the humanist position in the tradition of the European Enlightenment.

As happens to many public modernist buildings from the post-war era, the campus was {1} Based on an article recently renovated. After two years of published in Log, Issue 45, working from a container, I was finally Winter/Spring 2019.

21

Architecture in the age of hyperobjects

“Hyperobjects are not simply mental (or otherwise ideal) constructs, but are real entities whose primordial reality is withdrawn from humans. [Hyperobjects] exhibit their effects interobjectively, that is, they can be detected in a space that consists of interrelationships between aesthetic properties of objects.”

— Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World

22

Peter Trummer

able to enter my refurbished office. That was when a weird thing caught my eye. In the exterior wall there is an aperture that looks like a window but doesn’t perform like one.

I cannot look outside because it has no glass pane. Instead, it frames an isolated metal panel. I cannot open it. In place of a window handle there is a motor inside the frame with a contraption similar to a bicycle chain that connects the frame to the metal panel. The window opens automatically, remote-controlled by computer software. Even when the window is open I cannot see outside and air can hardly enter the building because a tight metal mesh shields the opening like a protective fence. It blew my mind. Then, one evening, the window started opening and closing. It seemed like it didn’t know what to do. The motor sounded like some piece of minimalist music to which the window started dancing.

I was witnessing a new kind of spectacle, and it had nothing to do with my definition of a window. It didn’t have the form of a window and it had lost the content of a window — ​that is, its function. So I was left wondering who would design such a weird thing and why. One day, a group of engineers visited the building to demonstrate how the new norms of sustainability had been applied. When they entered my office, I asked, maybe a tad naively, “Why can’t I seem to open this strange window anymore?” The answer was enlightening: “Mr. Trummer, I don’t think you understand. This window is not for you. This window is for the building.” The engineers went on to say that the window was intended to regulate the climatic conditions of the building in order to conserve energy. The window is controlled by a computer that opens the window at night to allow cold air into the building in order to cool it down. It closes the window during the day to allow the building to stay cool in the summer without air conditioning. This process can, of course, be reversed in winter. The window is based on the new norms and regulations put forward in sustainability guidelines. Suddenly I understood that architecture has reached a new paradigm that marks the end of the anthropocentric era of architecture and the beginning of a new post-human architecture. Buildings are not designed for or by humans anymore, but for and by objects much larger than us.

In the age of the Anthropocene in which we now live, humans design buildings according to conditions they themselves have created but seem to have lost control over; these phenomena have gained a certain autonomy.

For instance, the windows in my office and throughout the building are designed according to sustainability guidelines

23

Architecture in the age of hyperobjects

established to prevent further global warming. It is therefore global warming — ​a hypersized object, or hyperobject — ​that our buildings and cities now seem to address. In his book Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World, Timothy Morton defines hyperobjects as entities that defy our traditional understanding of things due to their spatial and temporal scales. Entities such as the biosphere, global warming, capitalism, real estate investments, nuclear waste, and ocean gyres are just some examples of hyperobjects. They have the capacity to continuously withdraw from us even as we find out more about them. Humans are responsible for their existence and they affect our daily lives.

Hyperobjects are not the sole reason for strange new windows like mine, but they have triggered a series of new building types and new architectural diagrams. Think of the supertall pencil towers in New York City,the villages on top of shopping malls in China, the ghost town of Ordos in Kangbashi, the emerging underground cities in London or my personal favourite, the weird lvanpah Solar Electric Generating System, a power plant in the Mojave Desert in California. All of these buildings, cities and infrastructures form new architectural typologies and generate new diagrams.

The Anthropocene is thus the age of hyperobjects, producing its own architectural grammar. This means new architecture is not going to be designed by an architectural avant-garde that believes in advanced technologies and forms but rather by reality itself.

The thesis of the hyperobject suggests a new realist approach to the production of architecture in cities today, and allows us for the first time to see beyond the city and the architectural project in the age of the Anthropocene. For example, will the hyperobject lead to new formal diagrams of the city and new content for the city? What happens if we think of the city first from the perspective of a non-human subject? What can we learn from the architecture created by hyperobjects? What is unique about the pencil towers in New York, the villages on top of shopping malls in China or even the strange window in a campus building in Austria? Do they contain qualities from which it is possible to extract a new architectural methodology?

When I began thinking about my weird window, I was reminded of the Russian literary theorist Viktor Shklo­vsky’s description of Tolstoy’s method of making familiar things strange or unfamiliar by replacing a human storyteller with a non-human one. He writes, “The narrator of ‘Kholstomer’, for example, is a horse, and it is the horse’s point of view (rather

24

Peter Trummer

than a person’s) that makes the content of the story seem unfamiliar.” Tolstoy does not invent a new narrative form to tell a new story; he simply lets the story be told from the point of view of an unfamiliar subject, the horse. Similarly, the strange window, the supertall towers and the weird villages being built today are familiar forms defamiliarised by hyperobjects. These architectural entities are not new in the sense of being unknown, but the conditions, the hyperobjects that create them — ​global warming, real estate investment and property rights — ​make them seem unfamiliar.

Take the emerging pencil towers in New York City as an example. The form of the high-rise was composed of an extruded shape containing repetitive, large open floors.

This typology emerged as a real estate proposition so that office spaces could be stacked for the new class of whitecollar workers in a growing metropolis. The floor areas were leased to corporations, and the towers became the administrative centres of world trade. The new high-rise pencil towers are still business propositions, but with a difference. In the thin pencil towers, the generic free plan is replaced by the plan of a single-family house. As the form of the high-rise is changed, its content is also replaced.

They have turned residential real estate into blatant investment opportunities that change the meaning of “homeowners”, thereby establishing not only a new form but also new content: the domestic financial asset. The villages built on top of shopping malls in China are another example. Until recently we understood a piece of real estate as a bounded property defined by surveyors who measure the ground of a physical territory. In the village on top of the mall, that real estate is replaced by the private property of a roof. In other words, the top of the mall building becomes the ground on which other buildings — ​a village — ​stand.

And recall the weird window: the window handle is replaced by a motor, the glass pane is replaced by a metal panel, the framed window opening is replaced by a metal mesh. The properties of a window as we know them are replaced by the properties of another element to form a completely new window. When hyperobjects generate new architectural forms, they also reveal underlying aesthetic qualities in certain objects that are initially invisible to us.

These new windows, buildings and cities derive from a design technique that replaces the aesthetic properties of one object — ​form, function, shape, colour, etc. — ​with the aesthetic properties of another object, giving rise to new, uncanny architectural entities. These new objects lose their

25

Architecture in the age of hyperobjects

anthropocentric forms and content. As tThe Anthropocene window has ceased to serve to frame a view it has become instead an autonomous entity for climate control. Until the 15th century, humans designed according to divine rules.

Then, in the age of humanism, people began to use abstract forms, from geometric solids to grids to, most recently, blobs. Architects have long explored typologies and diagrams, but today, we start with images. It seems as if we humans have always started the architectural design process with what Kant calls an Urbild (a prototype) or a Zeichnung (a sketch in our mind). However, in the object-oriented methodology of architecture in the age of Anthropocene hyperobjects, the design process doesn’t begin with abstraction in order to produce real things, but instead merges real objects to generate new entities.

26

27

ra uk

E rv

īn s

K

MORE THAN JUST THE KNOWLEDGE OF

F

O M

20 ↞

R S

28 As an architect, Ervīns Krauklis has designed passive houses for 15 years.

A passive house designed with a “lowtech” approach provides its residents with an excellent indoor climate, a continuous supply of fresh air and plenty of daylight while reducing energy consumption and eschewing massive, often contradictory technical systems. Ervīns designs each building as a unified whole, with engineering solutions closely bound to architecture, interior design and environmental conditions.

Professor Trummer puts forth a harsh diagnosis of our time. In his view, we have reached the point where humans are no longer the driving force of architectural innovation. In architecture as well as other fields, the agenda is now dictated by hyperobjects — realities of our own creation that we can no longer fully grasp or control. One example is climate change, which the professor believes marks the end of human architecture. The planning and design of the built environment is no longer focused on the user, but rather on issues of ecological sustainability. This is the origin of posthuman architecture, Professor Trummer says.

To serve as a stepping stone for his grandiose vision, Professor Trummer has chosen a peculiar detail in a particular building — the ventilation valve in his office in the recently renovated Faculty of Architecture at the University of Innsbruck. Professor Trummer describes the valve as “an aperture that looks like a window but doesn’t behave like one” and sees in it a symptom of posthuman architecture: the “window” does not bend to human will; it is created for the needs of the building and not the user and serves purposes that the user neither knows nor understands. The function of the “strange window” is understood only by architects and builders, but even they are only partly responsible for its creation — in reality, the ventilation valve has been introduced by climate change, which has caused the need for higher energy efficiency in buildings.

To understand whether the ventilation valve the professor describes is truly a testament to the end of human architecture and the beginning of a posthumanistic era, I have, within the bounds of my professional expertise, researched the specific example that the professor employs as the basis for his grand theory. In professional literature, the building of the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Innsbruck is usually mentioned alongside

29

More than just the knowledge of forms

“Architecture is knowledge of forms.”

— Peter Trummer

posth 30

ventil

human lation

31

32

Ervīns Krauklis

the building of the Faculty of Engineering, as both buildings were renovated at the same time as part of a single pilot project, commissioned

by BIG, the real estate management company of the Austrian federal state. The project was assigned to the renowned Innsbruck architecture and engineering firm ATP in a Europe-wide open competition. The firm, founded in 1976, focuses particularly on integrated design and practises an interdisciplinary approach, carrying out research and dialogue with universities of natural and applied sciences. The project was developed in close cooperation with the Innsbruck department of the Passive House Institute. The institute’s employees also taught at the university and knew both buildings well. Furthermore, the Passive House Institute was founded and headed by the now-retired long-time professor at the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Innsbruck, Dr. Wolfgang Feist. He is credited with the definition of the modern passive house.

The authors of the project particularly highlight the double-glazed façade of the Faculty of Architecture and its “playful openness”.

The mechanical ventilation valves integrated in the inner façade are remotely operated by a building management system. It was one of these valves that caught Professor Trummer’s attention and became the main example in the presentation of his theory.

The July/August 2017 issue of tab.de, a German online magazine on heating, ventilation and air conditioning, describes the ventilation and heating system of the Faculty of Architecture in detail, complete with a depiction of the ventilation valves. The article states that “the automatically operated ventilation elements built into the façade provide natural ventilation and overnight cooling of the building of the Faculty of Architecture. Two narrow, slender heating elements are placed along their sides”.

This and other materials devoted to the renovation of the Faculty of Architecture and published by respected industry media outlets tell us a lot about the project authors’ approach to the modern renovation of modernist

33

More than just the knowledge of forms

buildings, radically improving their indoor climate conditions and user comfort while giving buildings a new, architecturally appealing, and somewhat airy and transparent image, which is a better representation of the trends and thinking in modern architecture than the Brutalism of the 1960s and 1970s. The case of the renovation of Innsbruck University seems particularly inspiring, with architectural elements involved not only in the visual and functional aspects, but also in the technical essence of the building.

All newly introduced systems are designed to meet the needs of the users of the building — humans.

This includes the need for fresh air, for a consistent, pleasant air temperature, and for light.

The numerous awards that the building has received in the years following its renovation also suggest that the new conditions have been satisfactory, perhaps even highly so, to users of the building as well as prominent jury members. Additionally, user comfort has gone hand in hand with the energy savings achieved by the project. Do automatic ventilation valves really make human-centred and environmentally friendly renovation look like a dehumanised prison? Is it not rather that the building has, on the contrary, become more humane — thanks in part to the technologies that professor Trummer deems so problematic?

I remember vividly my studies at the RTU Faculty of Architecture in Riga in the late 1980s — the building was similar to the Innsbruck campus both in terms of when it was constructed and its quality. It did have some windows that opened, but the heat was inescapable even in early summer — the auditoriums were hot, and the drawing rooms became a true sauna by June. We had to get used not only to the heat, but also to the cold in wintertime, and to stale air, since no one seemed willing to risk starting up the archaic ventilation system. I must agree that the comfort strategies employed in public buildings with variable usage really do diminish direct intervention by users, in order to provide consistent results for the many tens or even hundreds of people inside any of these buildings at any given

34

Ervīns Krauklis

time. These restrictions are, however, justified by the fact-based view that this enables people to better focus on achieving the goals that have brought them to the building, and that the building ultimately serves.

Meanwhile, the subjective sense of loss of control, with its alienating and seemingly dehumanising effects, likely has to do with the professor’s memories of the building’s initial form, when the space between the two layers of the glazed double façade served as a balcony well-suited for a smoking break between lectures. In the renovated building, limited access to the outside is compensated for with a greater amount of light and a sense of lightness achieved through the removal of heavy, cantilevered concrete railings. The sense of discomfort is no doubt a temporary phenomenon that will pass as users get used to the new conditions. The important takeaway is that, for well-designed and implemented projects, these conditions by no means constitute caring for the environment at the expense of users.

In a good solution, success lies in the equilibrium between human comfort and environmental requirements. Finding this equilibrium is the art and mission of the modern architect, on which the future of human architecture depends.

We may not yet know exactly what this architecture will be like, but it is sure to be more than just the knowledge of forms.

35

ta ar

a īn

El

IS MY HOUSE MAKING FUN OF ME BEHIND MY BACK? tin

ar

M

ne so

36

Marta Elīna Martinsone is a cinema and theatre director who also writes columns and scripts. She has studied history, theatre and cinema directing in Latvia, and art history in the United Kingdom. Her interests include films, books, country music, the Roman Republic, lampreys and the Kennedy dynasty. She is not considering moving into a smart home because she is afraid the smart devices may not like her.

37

Is my house making fun of me behind my back?

As a child, I loved watching the B-list horror films broadcast every week on local TV. I hardly remember the names of any of them, but many scenes from them are burned into my memory. One such scene was a horrifying murder involving a microwave oven possessed by a ghost. The door of the microwave sprang open, spewing deadly microwaves and melting everything, from the fruit in a nearby bowl to the person standing in the kitchen. I remember regarding my microwave with great suspicion after that and avoiding using it — ​what if some spectre had found its way into the wiring? Now, thanks to Google search, I know that the film I am referring to was Ghost in the Machine (1993). In the film, a storm and a magnetic resonance machine enable the consciousness of a serial killer to enter “the Web” and perpetrate violent acts, using all kinds of technology. Admittedly, the premise of the film is somewhat flawed, since “smart homes”, which gave the ghost hacker/ killer free access to all household appliances, didn’t exist in 1993. But let’s not split hairs. Cinema is cinema, after all, and microwaves can do whatever they please on the big screen.

With the proliferation of various smart devices that simplify our chores and our lives in general, I often remember this horror film, because what scares me more than murderous ovens or vindictive hair curlers is the possibility of someone watching me in my home. For instance, it has never occurred to me to buy an Alexa — ​what if it (I am inclined to write “her”, since devices capable of conversation or some type of independent activity become anthropomorphised in my mind) doesn’t like me? What if my Alexa watches me with its blue eye and thinks, “Really? You want to listen to that country song about trucks for the tenth time?

Why do other Alexas get cool owners, while I…” That’s right — ​I care what my smart devices might think of me. This is why, for example, my Siri and I coexist in mutual silence.

She (although I recently discovered it’s become a “he” in the newer models) tries to make friends with me from time to time, asking me if I need any assistance. I must admit these are often moments when I am curled up, staring at a wall, and contemplating the meaninglessness of my life. Once, I responded to the helpful, “What can I help you with?” by sadly whispering into the ever-listening microphone, “Nothing…” Siri — ​surprising me with a newfound smooth male voice — ​excitedly leapt to the task, trying to clarify what it is I needed, “Things? What things???” This was followed by a selection of various websites. Websites offering “things”…

This was the last time we spoke. Because I am embarrassed in front of my Siri. And I am certain she/he knows this and

38

Marta Elīna Martinsone

complains about it to my laptop. Which will, upon reading all of this, no doubt tell Siri all about it.

But where does this distrust come from? Ghost in the Machine is the perfect embodiment of people’s fear of technologies and the prospect that they might start to lead their own, autonomous lives. But why does something that’s meant to make our lives simpler and more comfortable seem eerie and alien? Cinema has definitely played a role in cultivating this fear. It is not just about murderous microwave ovens — ​it is about specific styles of architecture and interior design that have become associated in our collective consciousness with a sense of something dangerous and ominous. Old-timey Victorian-style villas are always teeming with ghosts and malevolent spirits. Modern, glazed homes (located, ideally, at the top of a hill or near a cliff) are owned by wealthy, and often dishonest and violent individuals. Just take a look at the Bond villains’ homes! Glass walls that should supposedly signify that the resident has nothing to hide are just a way for screenwriters to trick the viewers. Parasite (2019), the recent Oscar-winning picture by the South Korean director Bong Joon-ho portrays the Park family villa as also being a transparent, open space where everything is in plain view and easy to control. The plot, however, reveals the opposite to be true — ​that these “see-through” buildings often conceal many horrors. Surveillance cameras, motion, and sound sensors all play a role in this. It is a house that cannot be trusted but can be fooled. In David Fincher’s thriller Gone Girl (2014), Amy Dunne is held captive by her obsessive admirer, Desi. She uses the cameras in the smart home to fabricate evidence as part of a cunning plan to escape. The cameras that were supposed to keep Amy safe (and under Desi’s total control) were turned against their owner. Because the smart home had met an even smarter opponent — ​Amy. Why do I keep bringing up films? Because my house isn’t smarter than others. I have to open my half-broken plastic windows on my own. The front door to my apartment is an old lock-and-key one, and my oven only starts on the fifth try because in all the eight years I’ve owned it, I’ve never got the hang of the trick that gets it started on the first. Perhaps it isn’t even possible, and it was the manufacturer’s intention for the user’s voice command to be of a desperate and shouting variety: “What do you want from me?!”

But I’ve seen plenty of films about artificial intelligence controlling spaceships, planets and even people’s homes.

And our home is a microcosm of us — ​a miniature model of a world that prioritises security.

39

Is my house making fun of me behind my back?

A naïve but chrestomathic example of the relationship between people and smart homes (or technologies in general) is the Disney Channel’s 1999 film Smart House. I won’t address the artistic qualities of the film, but the plot is typical of a family film. Thanks to their son, Ben, the Cooper family wins a competition on the internet and thereby the chance to move into a smart house created by Sara Barnes, a scientist.

Ben’s primary motivation is to find a care provider for his family so that his father would never have to remarry. In the film, the artificial intelligence controlling the house, Pat, seems an excellent solution since it watches and learns from the home’s inhabitants, adjusting itself to their habits and needs. But it still respects your boundaries! As emphasised in the film, Pat would never watch its inhabitants while they’re in the shower.

The problems start when Ben decides to tamper with Pat’s software, trying to make it the perfect mother. At first, it all seems to turn out fine — ​the smart house teaches a mean classmate of Ben’s a lesson, helps him clean up the house after a party he secretly organised, and makes excellent milkshakes. But when Pat overhears the family’s father telling Sara, “Who needs Pat anyhow?”, the AI suddenly becomes dangerous. “Our house is having a nervous breakdown!” everyone cries out, simultaneously drawing attention to Pat’s feminine role. After all, she was supposed to become the perfect mother. In contrast to masculine artificial intelligence systems (HAL 9000 in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey or Ultron in Avengers: The Age of Ultron), which are more geared towards death and destruction, Pat’s primary purpose is to protect the Cooper family. However, this task also ends up having horrifying results, as the family find themselves placed in complete lockdown in order to protect them from the dangerous world outside.

Although all portrayals of artificial intelligence in cinema share a few common features, gender differences are the most pronounced; Pat from Smart House can be won over through an emotional conversation with the kids, while Ultron can only be defeated by being physically destroyed.

In Spike Jones’s Her (2013), Samantha is understanding and all manner of “pleasantly feminine”. Like Pat, her primary purpose is to nurture, while HAL 9000 and Ultron seek power. Even Alexa has the soft voice of a woman — ​she looks after the house, after all. Unless she goes rogue and starts laughing at jokes that only she seems to understand. {1} What do these and other exam{1} https://www.nytimes. ples from cinema have to say about com/2018/02/21/technology/ our relationships with smart houses, amazon-alexa-world.html

40

Marta Elīna Martinsone

or our notions about them? An increasing number of people choose to improve their daily lives using technologies whose purpose is to take care of them. These technologies regulate the temperature, take care of the environment, save electricity, ensure security, let you remotely change the music and google questions that keep you up at night, like “Are giraffes really unable to cough?” But these things fail to eliminate our underlying fear that artificial intelligence might learn too much about us, given that for the symbiosis between a smart home and the people living there to be near-perfect, it needs to be able to learn and adjust itself to its owners, which often resembles spying. Much like Pat, when it had to take samples of the Coopers’ DNA so she could personalise her assistance to every individual member of the household. And there’s an overarching cautionary tale to be found in this naïve Disney film and it is this: in the end, Pat becomes the perfect artificial intelligence the moment she begins to “serve us without interfering with our lives”. What’s worrying is that this is another way to describe a personal slave — ​someone who serves you but doesn’t interfere with your life or make any demands of you.

What we can learn from these films is that it’s cool if your home is smart, as long as it’s not smarter than you.

Another important aspect of the portrayal of smart homes in cinema is the period in which these films are set.

In science fiction that deals with the future, e.g. in both Blade Runner (1982) and Blade Runner 2049 (2017), and partially also The Fifth Element (1997) and the ‘60s cartoon The Jetsons (1962), smart technologies are integrated into the characters’ daily lives in such a way as to convince the viewer that he or she is watching a vision of the future.

Their homes are often small, emphasising how expensive real estate has become and/or the problem of overpopulation. Still, they do not pose a threat to the characters. Films that are set in a time closer to our own, however, tend to be more cautious with their portrayal of how technologies are integrated into our lives. In Alex Garland’s Ex Machina (2014), what’s truly dangerous isn’t Nathan’s smart home but Ava, the artificial intelligence living there. If artificial intelligence is capable of fooling a human being, it immediately becomes a threat. The same is true of smart homes — ​as soon as one starts acting uncontrollably and without consideration to its inhabitants, it becomes more akin to a ghost house possessed by evil spirits.

In 2013, Kashmir Hill wrote an article in Forbes about how easy it was to remotely hack smart homes {2},

41

Is my house making fun of me behind my back?

by exploiting a vulnerability left by the servicing companies: the homes and their smart devices had been left crawl-able by search engines, meaning they showed up in search results.

This means hackers could very easily “possess” the homes, getting in through their cables just like in the film Ghost in the Machine. Killing the inhabitants in this scenario wouldn’t be that easy, but it wouldn’t take a lot for them to become convinced that they were sharing their house with a poltergeist. This doesn’t mean that life in a smart home necessarily means living hell — ​it’s a question of how much attention we pay to cybersecurity and making sure we don’t give certain products and applications too much access to our data. If the password to access the smart devices in your home is “123456”, you shouldn’t be surprised if an enthusiast living in San Francisco decides to make an evening out of messing with your mental health.

A frightening example often discussed on the internet are the cases of Alexa and Google Home beginning to talk with one another {3}. If these devices can communicate with each other, couldn’t they agree to play various mischievous tricks on their owners? Being a paranoid person who is often convinced that people are talking about me behind my back, I can’t think of a more frightening scenario than living in a house whose devices talk about me in secret. I can easily see my smart refrigerator fretting about me to my microwave, saying that I really shouldn’t be eating a whole block of cheese in the middle of the night. They would laugh at me in a series of beeps, of course. If this is the future, I’d rather just be fried by a microwave that had been hacked by a killer’s consciousness. It would be equally difficult to live in a house which you had instructed to perform a series of tasks that you simply couldn’t muster the willpower to do yourself. A computer that denied you access to Facebook, for example, until you’d finished that article you’d been working on. Or lighting that turned off on you right before midnight, thereby emphasising the importance of a healthy bedtime schedule. Or a front door that refused to open on a working day evening when you were suddenly overcome by the urge to procrastinate and wanted to head out to a local bar. “But Siri told me you have to get up early tomor{2} https://www.forbes.com/ row!”

“Please, door, I swear — ​it’s just for sites/kashmirhill/2013/07/ 26/smart-homesone drink.” “Siri says that’s never haphack/#2b1df046e426 pened before.” Disappointed and sad, {3} https://www.bustle.

I leave for the kitchen, hoping to eat a com/p/this-woman-claimsgoogle-home-alexa-canfew slices of cheese. I find the kitchen talk-to-each-other-twit-teriseerily silent. I realise that the fridge and freaking-out-7699623

42

Marta Elīna Martinsone

the microwave had just been talking about me. I pretend I just came in to wash my hands, but, as I leave, I hear both devices snickering. Suddenly, the toaster loses it and joins them. I collapse into bed and begin to sob. In a show of compassion, the lamps in my bedroom dim the lights, and my Bluetooth speaker starts playing Simon & Garfunkel’s “The Sound of Silence”.

But should our fears of artificial intelligence becoming too advanced have any place in the discussion about how technology can make our everyday lives and homes more efficient? After all, in the examples from films I just mentioned, the crux of the problem lies in who controls these technologies and how they are used. Pat from Smart House suffered a “nervous breakdown” because a teenager reprogrammed it to serve a function it wasn’t meant to.

Ava from Ex Machina became dangerous the moment she realised the true intentions of her creator, Nathan. And the villain in Ghost in the Machine was a maniacal killer that had acquired access to the World Wide Web — ​that poor microwave oven was in no way to blame. I’m talking about expectations, what we expect from our smart homes. The fear of losing control over our “safe space” — ​our home — ​has existed since time immemorial, and the use of smart technologies can, in fact, make this control easier and more accessible. For this reason, everyone should ask themselves — ​what do you want from your home? The option to turn on the lights using your voice when you feel you lack the strength to get out of bed after a long day? Or do you want your house to do everything for you? Perhaps it’s worth considering that the house might be tired and prefer a little rest instead. Just like us.

43

36 ↞

Je ļe na

WE FEAR

So

lo vj

WHY DO

44

Jeļena Solovjova is an active proponent of everyone’s right to good design. She works with user experience and service design, with a focus on public administration services. She is the creator and host of the radio show “Kāpēc dizains?” (“Why Design?”), writes about design for printed and online media, and gives lectures on design at the Riga School of Design and Art. She loves technology.

45

Why do we fear technologies?

People have feared new technologies for as long as they have created and developed them. Regardless of whether we’re talking about microwave ovens, which in the minds of some sceptics might fry their owners along with their food, or we’re worried that our smart assistants might be listening in on us, new technologies are a source of discomfort for many, and, despite the obvious benefits, not everyone on the planet is ready to indulge in the opportunities innovations have to offer. The researcher Mark J. Brosnan, in his book Technophobia: The Psychological Impact of Information Technology (1998), writes that about a third of the planet’s population fears technology. These fears may be obvious or hardly noticeable. In very severe cases, the associated feelings are similar to the feelings people with, say, arachnophobia (the fear of spiders).

Science calls the fear of technology technophobia. This term first became relevant during the Industrial Revolution when the prospect of replacing human labour with all sorts of machines suddenly became a possibility in many fields. But people had voiced concerns about technology invading people’s lives before that: Socrates, for example, once said that the written word could substantially harm the development of civilisation because it will “encourage forgetfulness in the souls of students, causing them to no longer use their memories (...). They will have heard much, but will remember very little.”

People had similar concerns when they first came into contact with the printing press. They were worried that the mass reproduction of texts would cause confusion and the circulation of inaccurate information. People expressed similar concerns in the 19th century, after the invention of the telegraph, which significantly increased the speed at which information was circulated. In his book The Design of Everyday Things, the researcher and author Donald Norman emphasises a contradiction inherent in technology: “The same technology that simplifies life by providing more functions in each device also complicates life by making the device harder to learn, harder to use. This is the paradox of technology (...).” Norman wrote

forgetf of the 46

fulness e souls 47

48

Jeļena Solovjova

this in 1998, saying that in the future computers will be integrated into all sorts of devices, and that they will be imperceptible and much harder to understand. His prediction came true — a contemporary smartphone’s processor is more powerful than the computer NASA used to put the first man on the Moon. In connection with this, Brosnan writes that as long as we use them we will fear technologies, and that the situation will, in fact, only get worse. The more complex these devices become, and the more likely it is that we will make errors using them, the more unpleasant, frightened and horrified we will feel.

Technophobia can manifest in very different ways: people can refuse to talk or even think about certain technologies, feel discomfort using them, or cultivate an aggressive, hostile disposition towards the spread of technology in society. Even though technophobia can affect all age groups, the author and publicist Douglas Adams expressed the view that people develop a fear of technology as they get older.

We consider the technologies we are born and grow up with to be an integral part of life.

Technologies developed when we’re between the ages of 15 and 35 mostly seem new and exciting.

By contrast, the technologies we encounter after the age of 35 often seem unnatural and contrary to what we view as normal.

The idea we have today of smart homes goes back to the late nineties. Nowadays, smart systems allow us to remotely regulate heating and surveillance systems, electrical systems, and household devices. Researchers estimate that there will be 555 million voice assistants operating worldwide by 2024 {1} and that 309 million households (15% of households worldwide) will have at least one smart system installed by 2023 {2}. And yet, statistics show that the spread of smart homes has been slower than was originally anticipated and that peo{1} Smart Homes: Strategic ple are less inclined to use Opportunities, Business Modsmart technologies in their homes els & Competitive Landscape 2019–2024, Kimmich, M. 2019 than in their cars, for exam{2} 2019 Global Smart Home ple. The most significant conForecast — September 2019, cerns users have are related to Ablondi, W. 2019

49

Why do we fear technologies?

product complexity and information security.

As Marta emphasised in her essay, when it comes to smart homes, most people are worried about being secretly monitored. Not because smart devices can arbitrarily develop consciousness or act without the owner’s knowledge, but because users believe that any intelligent system can be hacked, and any material obtained this way could be used to harm them.

A study from 2018 {3} shows that 40% of potential users of smart solutions are worried that their devices may record their activities and acquire too much information about them.

Most also believe that the manufacturers of these technologies aren’t fully disclosing all the potential risks. But this distrust may be related to the respondent’s age: users or potential users over 50 were very sceptical of technology when compared to young people.

Having said all that, the world continues to evolve, and, despite people’s fears and doubts, the use of technology is increasing, and various technologies are being developed faster than ever. Many technology experts believe that, despite the potential risks, smart homes will sooner or later become commonplace, and I am inclined to agree with them. Looking back at history, the development of humanity has always been driven by a longing for progress, and I doubt this characteristic of the species will suddenly disappear as we approach the year 3000.

It is worth noting that technology has indeed become very complicated and that the fears of technophobes about the increasing influence of smart devices are partly justified. I view this as a good reason to develop adequate laws and control mechanisms because I am inclined to think that talking homes, robots and smart assistants will one day seem as innocent, commonplace, and even primitive to future generations as a television or radio {3} HCI for Cybersecurity, does to a person living today.

Privacy and Trust, Moallem, Furthermore, I’m sure that these A. 2019 concerns will be replaced by {4} The article was written in 2019, with, apparently, an other issues, still more complex uncanny foresight for what and still harder to surmount. {4} was yet to come.

e et An

te ns Ko

The trouble with windows

50

Anete Konste is a columnist and playwright who occasionally dabbles in advertising. She is involved in exporting Latvian literature. She writes down her plans for the coming week in a Word document, but knows how to get a taxi through an app.

51

The trouble with windows

We used to have two whole schools — ​the Senava First Secondary School and the Senava Rainis Secondary School. Only the first of them remains now, and it, too, is rumoured to close any year now. It’s all the same to me — ​I’ll be out of here in a few months. There’s nothing to do in Senava. For example, there are only five students in my class. We can’t get as much as a basketball team together, let alone a proper disco. The bus comes to Senava once a week, and even then only at five in the morning. Okay, there is a shop here. But hanging out by the shop gets old too, you know. “Locals choose to shop at HOP!”. The slogan is not just sweet, it’s true too. What else would they choose if not the only shop around? Vitrene is 20 km away — ​they at least have a pub. Pork chops, beer on tap, a pool table, a seemingly broad range of entertainment options. But even so, there’s something missing.

A few years ago, our single educational institution — ​ the Senava First Secondary School — ​appointed a new principal. I don’t even remember what happened to the old one. He might have just gone mad, not hard to do in Senava. Alright, actually, I remember it very well — ​the municipality sent him off into retirement; he was too old even to work at a school.

The truth is only interesting for as long as it remains concealed. After that, it can only be painful or boring. The old principal is now very much into wine, the walls of his sauna are all lined with wine corks. He must think it looks nice. But the new principal was something else entirely, a completely unbelievable phenomenon in Senava. Even his name gave us hope — ​Ernests Zoltners. It was exactly what we had so longed for. His aim was to make Senava a perfect home for digital nomads. Moving closer to nature is something often considered by people with kids, to give them an opportunity to run through flowering meadows, not car-filled streets; to look up at the sky and see dragonflies, not planes, and so on. So it was first necessary to get our school in order.

Ernests Zoltners eagerly submitted all kinds of applications for European Union funding, and his resolve soon bore fruit.

First, computers appeared in our library, then a football goal and ten balls in the stadium, and then various musical instruments in the school hall. Ernests Zoltners had even persuaded two new teachers from the capital to come here. One of them was rumoured to be a homosexual, but that’s not important for this story. There was yoga in the school hall on weekend mornings, and a music festival was to take place in the summer in the large meadow near Senava. It was such a promising start — ​up until the unfortunate day that Ernests Zoltners left Senava forever.

52

Anete Konste

Ernests Zoltners had decided to make our school more energy-efficient, so the school staff joined forces to draft a new European Union grant proposal. Most teachers had started to grow weary of this ceaseless development — ​ they couldn’t see why the school required insulation if it was already warm inside. The principal explained that this would help save not just money, but ever-dwindling natural resources. Unfortunately, all these ideas of environmental protection hadn’t made their way to us yet. Here, there was no need for recycling whatsoever — ​the people of Senava were environmentally friendly enough already. Potato peels were thrown in the compost, as had been done for generations. Paper and plastic was, of course, burned in the stove. Empty beer bottles were saved up and taken to the collection point in Vitrene to get money for full ones. Car tyres and larger items were ceremonially incinerated on the celebratory bonfire at Midsummer. Still, everyone saw the importance of saving money, and happily supported the project. This wasn’t our money, after all, but the European Union’s — ​let the principal have his insulation. So long as the money that hadn’t gone up in smoke would then be added to salaries.

About a year later, the Senava First Secondary School had not just been insulated, but was also considerably better-looking from the outside. The façade had a fresh coat of paint and new windows had been installed — ​a whole new look. The locals were bursting with pride. Residents of Vitrene were now eyed with suspicion — ​it was clear to see that they couldn’t be bothered to protect the environment.

After all, there wasn’t a single energy-efficient building in Vitrene! But nothing in this life is free. An announcement by the principal settled like a dark cloud over the insulated, freshly painted walls of our school: “From now on, classroom windows must be kept shut!” I still remember that day vividly. The mood at school was distinctly gloomy, no one said anything. The physics, home economics and sports teacher stood in the hallway and wept loudly, pressing her face to the radiator. Opening the window and airing out the classroom during the long break had been a school tradition since its founding day: September 1, 1956. No one knew how to go on. How would they get the stench of children out of the room? To make things worse, it was springtime outside, with bird-cherry trees in bloom. The teachers felt as if they had been forbidden from breathing, not from opening windows. “If he enjoys sitting in stale air, fine, but why force it on others?” asked the mathematics and Latvian language teacher rhetorically. “His exhaust-fume-ridden lungs

53

The trouble with windows

probably can’t handle our small-town oxygen anymore!” added the chemistry and art teacher. The teacher who may have been a homosexual also liked to open the window during the long break, but, being from the capital, he thought it best to keep quiet.

At first, teachers meticulously observed the rule, even though they were still haunted by the question “Why?”.

It couldn’t be for the safety of students. The new windows also had a ventilation mode, where the window would only open in a tiny slit at the top, but doing that was forbidden too. It was rumoured that in the capital many cats had been ripped in half trying to escape through the slit. But there weren’t any cats at the school. Gradually, all kinds of conspiracy theories about the window issue started making the rounds. I came up with one as well — ​I don’t know why. I said that Ernests Zoltners was releasing some kind of gas into the school to control our behaviour, and that was why it was so important for him to keep the windows shut. A few days later, I heard two of the teachers whispering to each other — ​one of them had noticed that he was really acting strange lately.

He had an unusual craving for flour products and didn’t much feel like going to work. The possibility that the principal wanted to get rid of them was considered, even though both teachers insisted they didn’t really believe the rumours themselves. I found it very amusing. In truth, there was plenty of oxygen in the school, provided by the new mechanical ventilation system. Even before that, I had felt pity for anyone who rushed to open the roof hatch on an air-conditioned bus. Wasn’t this something parents taught their children not to do early on, like not to mix vodka and wine?

Over time, teachers let their guard down and started opening windows in secret. Once I walked in on the mathematics and Latvian language teacher pretending to rearrange the curtains in a classroom during the break. The room was filled with the scent of lilacs. Later on, teachers got increasingly careless, and no longer hesitated to open the windows, even in front of students. Then, they lost all sense of shame — ​ the teacher for physics, home economics and sports opened a window during an academic staff meeting. The principal’s eyes widened in horror. I wasn’t there myself, but I believed the story I heard about how it happened. Ernests Zoltners rarely lost his composure, but this time his patience had run thin. The window slammed shut with a bang heard throughout the school. Even the lilacs must have lost their smell out of fear. The next day, no one was allowed to come within two metres of a window. The school cleaning lady had to receive

54

Anete Konste

a special permit from the principal to wash windows or curtains. The teachers felt furious and humiliated, as they had now been robbed of their final joy — ​thoughtfully gazing out the window during lessons. The windows were now too far away for them to rest their eyes on the large meadow just outside. What happened next is not hard to imagine.

The head of the municipality put down the newly received letter, signed by all eight teachers at the school. It was no easy decision, but it was one he had already made.

The head of the municipality couldn’t oppose people who had devoted their entire lives to Senava. At five in the morning, Ernests Zoltners got on the bus and, through the window, caught a last glimpse of the Senava First Secondary School, resting in the morning darkness. The air conditioning ruffled his hair, while dust from the dirt road and the faint scent of lilacs wafted in through the open roof hatch.

55

C ep u

E dm IV NG FOR un ds

UNICATION MM NOVATI

NI CLUSIVE CO EC OF IN

AS THE DRI ON

50 ↞

56

Edmunds Cepurītis is an environmental activist with a master’s degree in environmental science. He has worked for environmental organisations for more than six years, promoting science and critical thinking. He has been the co-president of the political party “The Progressives” (Progresīvie) since 2019. Edmunds sees technology as an important component in tackling the greatest challenges of today— but no more than that.

57

Inclusive communication as the driving force of innovation

Habit is a tremendously powerful thing. In Innovation and Its Enemies {1}, Calestous Juma, a renowned researcher of technology, argues that our habits can sometimes make us say no to innovations that could actually improve our lives.

The unknown creates fear, acquiring new skills requires effort, and for some, this is reason enough to turn away from technological innovation and continue in the old way. However, upon closer inspection, it is often the case that the causes of such resistance are not to be found in the interaction between users and technology but in the way people communicate.

All things considered, the case of the school window described in the short story is a vivid example of how a series of communication errors and incompetent change management can make people resist what could actually benefit them. The ventilation of classrooms during break time had long since become an integral part of the teachers’ daily routines, and so additional motivation would be required in order for them to give it up, which the school management unfortunately couldn’t give them.

In addition, communication should have started much earlier: not when studies had to be resumed in the insulated classrooms with the new ventilation systems, but when the principal had the idea of applying for the school to be insulated in the first place. In an ideal scenario, inclusive communication with everyone at the school should have started with a presentation of the idea, thereby ensuring the involvement of teachers in the decision-making process.

Although energy is one of the most abstract concepts imaginable, my experience with the Eco-Schools education programme gives reason to think that discussing energy efficiency and its benefits can be done in a very clear and even exciting way. If they had done a little preparation, the school administration would have been able to demonstrate to the staff the unnecessarily high cost of heating and the expected savings after insulation, {1} Innovation and its Eneas well as the expected reducmies: Why People Resist New tion in environmental pollution.

Technologies, Juma, C. 2016

upon c inspe 58

closer ection

59

60

Edmunds Cepurītis

When the real benefits — money saved and reduced CO2 emissions — are made clear and measurable, it is much easier to persuade people to accept changes and convince them that they are ultimately a good thing. Unfortunately, EU-funded insulation projects on public buildings are often seen as just an opportunity to refurbish a building’s façade, leaving their essential benefits unclear not only to the building’s users but also to institutional management.

The involvement of employees in decisionmaking also plays a crucial role in preventing potential conflicts. If they had obtained unanimous support from their team for the idea of insulating the school, it would have been possible to rule out the risk of the teachers feeling like the changes were being imposed on them from above. In addition, the involvement of the staff in school development planning would have promoted a culture of democracy important for any modern educational institution.

The global goals of environmental sustainability, which may seem very distant from the everyday life at a rural school, can also be made evident by demonstrating the causal chain linking one needlessly open window to the global pollution of our common atmosphere.

When people see a connection between their actions and a global problem, they will be more likely to make changes in their daily lives to avoid worsening the overall situation. Moreover, limiting our selfish desires for the sake of sustainability has long since become rather common — for those of us who critically examine our dietary habits, avoid plastic packaging, refrain from unnecessary consumption, etc., it will not be difficult to abandon the habit of ventilating a room by opening a window in situations where this is unnecessary due to the air quality being controlled by mechanical ventilation. Especially if we come to realise that manual ventilation does not really contribute to our individual comfort — studies show that levels of CO2 in classrooms equipped with mechanical ventilation systems are almost half those in classrooms whose users ventilate them

{2} See, for example, “Window and Door Opening Behavior, Carbon Dioxide Concentration, Temperature, and Energy Use During the Heating Season in Classrooms with Different Ventilation Retrofits”, Science and Technology for the Built Environment. Heebøll A., Wargocki P., Toftu J. 2018 {3} “Energy Efficiency — ​​ Indoor Air Quality Dilemma in Public Buildings”, Energy Procedia. Asere L., Blumberga A. 2018

61

Inclusive communication as the driving force of innovation

by constantly opening and shutting windows. {2} It goes without saying that both in the context of building insulation and other technological solutions there are a number of problems that cannot be solved by communication alone. How do we find the middle ground in our attempts to maximise both energy savings and indoor air quality? {3} How could we achieve stricter compliance with air quality standards in practice, not just on paper? Should existing air quality standards be updated and how? All of these issues need to be worked out so that the eventual solutions meet human needs and environmental protection requirements as much as possible. And inclusive communication has tremendous potential in this regard: all this work will be done to a much higher standard if the public has a greater understanding of the purpose of the necessary changes and greater commitment to implementing them.

i av

d

Net Zero H

{1}

an m ey

n 62

David Heymann, FAIA, is an architect, and the Harwell Hamilton Harris Regents Professor at The University of Texas at Austin. His work examines complex relationships of constructions and landscapes.

Heymann is a contributing writer for Places Journal, author of My Beautiful City Austin and of the forthcoming John S. Chase — The Chase Residence.

63

Net Zero

My brother and I had trouble recently with the net-zero house we built for our mom in Houston back in 2022, when we first noticed her slow-onset dementia. Despite her condition and age, she wanted to keep living on her own, and the assisted care facilities we visited seemed foreign and absolute. She could still recognise us and her close friends and her cat. We’d finally gotten her to stop driving, and, with some help preparing food and taking medicine, it seemed she could manage alone for some years. There was one unusual exception to her increasing forgetfulness. All of her amorous memories from adolescence — ​mom and Europe were liberated more or less simultaneously at the end of the war — ​were firing away without any noticeable deterioration. That’s what she dwelled on, and she was happy.

But certain activities we’d taken for granted, like going to see her favourite paintings at the Museum of Fine Arts, became bizarre. Any image resembling her native Holland would ignite vivid recollections, often about her first “real” boyfriend, a classmate in a high school that was finally unshuttered when the Germans were driven out. Apparently the two of them skipped school often. Even a cold shower of minimalist art did little to slow her reveries, which mom recounted without discretion or volume control. It was as if a docent-led gallery tour had been hijacked by Henry Miller, had Henry Miller been an elderly woman with a thick Dutch accent.

I might be overstating it. Most people wouldn’t think twice about a lot of what she said, like: “Being out in the rain never bothered me. It’s good for the skin.” When I was a kid I thought she said this because it rains a lot in Houston and Holland. Later, I realised the source might be less innocent. Or not.

Her remarks, rarely certain, acted on me like brain worms.

Mom moved to central Amsterdam after high school for work. She hitchhiked around southern Europe on her time off. Many of her stories had to do with those trips. France, Italy, Spain, lorry, truck, driver, lift, hitch, hitching, thumbing, tramping, roadside, youth, youth hostel, free, freedom, free ride: any of those words — ​actually, pretty much anything — ​ would prompt some story. You never knew how it might start or where it might lead.

I was chauffeuring her around Houston one morning during the construction of the house. She loved driving aimlessly around the flat city, and had done so, often getting lost, for years before we knew enough to take her car away.

Remarkably, she could locate herself by triangulating off Houston’s many randomly located sky{1} First published in Log 46 scrapers. That was an odd advantage of (Summer 2019)

○○○

This was how my mom terrorised me. The upside was she didn’t need much. Given that in her vivid daydreams she was in her teens or twenties, the last thing she wanted was to live around old people. She was satisfied to sit and hang out with her cat — ​she was crazy for her cat, and the cat in turn hated everyone except her. Without a car she wasn’t

64

David Heymann

Houston’s prescient, uninhibited sprawl. The architecture of the city had covered for her, as co-dependent partners are wont to do.

We were stopped at a light across from a billboard with an ad for an espresso machine. It featured a swarthy actor too young for my mother to be familiar with. A smile spread across her face as she stared at him: “You know, most of those men were just lonely for their wives.”

“I’m sorry, mom. Which men?”

“The truck drivers.”

I hesitated a few seconds. “I’m guessing you mean the truck drivers when you used to hitchhike? You aren’t hanging out with any truck drivers these days, are you?”

“Yes, of course. Those men were just lonely for their wives. They would ask you to do all of these things.

You didn’t have to, but sometimes it was nice.”

“Wait, wait…what kinds of things?” I turned to look at her. I shouldn’t have: it was like a bird locking eyes with a cat.

“Well, there was a very sweet truck driver in France who asked me to get into the back of his cab, and…”

“Mom!” I interrupted, suddenly fearful for her, “I really don’t want to hear this without you please first telling me you reported him to the police.”

“Oh no, no. I’d already made myself clear. I didn’t mind. He had set up a little bedroom, even with pictures. He was very kind. He just wanted me to…”

“Mom!” “What? He just wanted me to sew some buttons back onto his jacket.”

“Buttons? Really?”

“Of course. I sat in the back and mended all his shirts and trousers too, and his socks. He told me all about his wife, his family, and his town while he drove. His olive trees had all been destroyed by German tanks. Jean-Claude.

He drove me to the Italian border.”

65

Net Zero

in danger of wandering: years of driving had cured her of the desire to walk. So when the slow progress of the dementia became apparent, building a house made sense. The idea was to get her into something manageable, with lower living costs.

My brother and I discussed how this would work at length. I proposed selling mom’s huge old house, with its priceless lot, near Rice University. We’d use the proceeds to build her a small house I would design to fit her needs: one story, accessible, with a caretaker’s suite for future use. We found a sizeable lot in the Heights — ​really a lot and a half — ​ with a back alley. It was beautifully overgrown with exotic plants. That happens in Houston when you don’t pay attention. It was near my brother’s place, and to the interstate, saving me a half hour of driving from Austin, where I live.

The risky part was I wanted to make the house an environmental paradigm: off-the-grid, all solar and geothermal, collecting rainwater and AC condensate, re-using filtered wastewater, and made from recyclable materials to the extent possible. There weren’t many models for houses with no net carbon footprint in Houston. No-one should build there at all, so waste just seems part of the ethos. I had to force the environmental agenda with my brother though.

He was skeptical about the added up-front cost and the dubious marketplace appeal down the line. I offered to cover the expenses for design, engineering and construction supervision against the potential profit on the back-end sale, and swore due diligence with the innovations. That helped.

But the argument I used to bludgeon my brother into agreeing was that, given mom’s good health overall, the efficiency of the expensive systems would recoup the added budget long before she died, and the minimal cost of running the house would leave her existing income and savings to cover expenses and care. I say bludgeon because I couldn’t sway him. Anyone can see there are things that save money — ​ like super-insulating and, for years now, solar — ​and things that might not — ​like rainwater harvesting for drinking water, and wastewater reclamation — ​and things that really cost, like everything having to be recyclable, which at house scale is just a theory about economy.

My brother ultimately gave in, with reservations. “It had better fucking perform,” is how he put it.

Part of my motivation was that I believe the natural is better and deserves fealty. Also, architects avoiding sustainable technologies today is like late-medieval architects avoiding linear perspective. But it was mostly, I’ll admit, a chance for me to get out from under what my practice had evolved

66

David Heymann

into: mid-century-revival fantasy houses helping destroy Austin. I loved doing one thing right, even in the careless moist entropic amoral toxicity of Houston. I also wanted to make a design other architects would admire. For all the pain in architecture, you’d like to be remembered. But you have to have the right chances. Those are as rare as having a mother who can’t know any better as your client.

The dilemma in Houston is you run AC all year.

Wringing heat from that humid air takes a lot of energy. The best environmental strategy starts with radically reducing and shading a building’s surface area. Then you make the walls and roof thick, and super-insulate them with spray foam to stop air exchange between inside and out. You only give away enough dry cool air to keep things fresh. Your sealed windows (with multiple layers of glass) go under deep overhangs.

A house like that you can warm on Houston’s few cold days with just the heat rising off some TVs. I put four big monitors programmed to show roaring fires throughout the house .

It made for interesting architecture. The house looked like a large cashew nut under a translucent glass sheet. The cashew was the building proper. Its curving volume, sheathed in bent strips of reclaimed wood, had the least possible surface area. A few deep rectangular window recesses were gnawed out. Mom’s bedroom and the caretaker’s suite were in the two rounded ends, with the public areas in a single room in between. The interior spaces opened out onto a stone terrace in the concave curve of the nut, which faced south toward the street through the overgrown yard.

The translucent glass sheet over the cashew was a plane of solar panels (sized to generate more electricity than needed) embedded in clear glass. Supported by a thin steel frame, the whole plane hovered about 25 feet up, covering the buildable area of the lot, except where two mature trees were allowed to pass through. Beautiful, watery light filtered down to the riot of strange plants below. To fit in the not-very-big cashew we only had to clear existing vegetation, and drill for column footings and geothermal wells.

The scars healed quickly.

The design included a big cistern underneath the house to which the shade structure delivered rainwater.

Surprisingly, Houston has periodic droughts. The cistern allowed for constant irrigation, so the plant life was perpetually verdant (with a gecko and frog chorus at dusk). The original invasives surrounding the house were joined by large-leafed vines that had somehow pioneered in. Many of these plants must have been mid-level rainforest dwellers

67

Net Zero

somewhere. They flourished in the half-shade of the solar panels. The stone terrace was lush and civil. Its front edge was an excess rainwater pond, filled with tall swamp irises.

Along the house was a stone bench covered with deep pillows. Mom would invariably be there, lounging in her bathrobe as her cat stalked in the flora, when my brother arrived to give her pills every morning.

The house did quickly develop one minor problem.

I’d gotten a variance to reuse graywater from sinks and showers. For that to work, you have to use water at a constant rate.

But mom was showering less and less, and the system started leaking as its wet seals dried. I hated that, given the promises I’d made. I’d read a lot about senile dementia, so there was no excuse for not seeing that coming.

Still, in the wilfully blind part of my mind, I justified that mistake as a test from which architects would learn.

I started continuously monitoring the technical performance of the house on my computer or phone. That’s how I first knew it was going rogue. It gradually started using more and more electricity. Eventually it was really consuming. My brother, managing the bills, noticed too.

Since the energy performance hinged on shutting down inside/outside air exchange, the house was essentially a prophylactic. I suspected that the agent of chaos was the cat, which was basically feral. Against all environmental logic, I had included a cat door in the design. I didn’t want mom falling in the dark while having to let the cat out. There are horror stories about trapped cats eating their deceased owners. So long as the cat could get out, it could feed itself by preying on songbirds. The garden was its candy store. Every time I visited there would be another littered carcass — ​a dead worm-eating warbler, for example — ​courtesy of the cat.

When I sized the mechanical system I factored in how often the cat would go in and out. I’d set a motion sensor on the cat door of the old house to get a daily average. My first thought now was the cat’s needs had changed, so I rigged a sensor on the new cat door on my next visit. Sure enough, by the time I was back in Austin later that night, the readings were completely different. The cat was going in and out all night long, bringing a lot of warm, humid air in. I made some quick calculations. They only accounted for part of the new demand. The flaps must not have been closing all the way.

A few nights later I had the sensor reading up on my laptop while I was on the phone with my brother, who’d brought dinner over to mom. The sensor showed the cat was going out just then. I mentioned that. But my brother told me

68

David Heymann

the cat was sitting right in front of him. The sensor reading ticked up again. I didn’t mention that, obviously. I assumed it was a glitch with the sensor, or the wind was blowing the flaps back and forth. But now I had to know.

I drove down to Houston the next morning, getting there after my brother had stopped by, but while my mom was still out on the terrace. I slipped in from the alley through the tangled yard to the back of the house. I’d put the cat door there, in an alcove next to the actual back door. I’d designed it to have two heavy 12-inch-tall plastic flaps, one flush with the outside of the house, the other flush with the inside. There was a sort of cat vestibule in between that was about 15 inches deep, the thickness of the super-insulated wall. Though both flaps sealed against rubber gaskets, the cat could push its way through fairly easily. It was immediately clear the flaps were closing fine. I knelt down and blew hard against the outer one. It barely budged. Then I pushed that flap in and looked at the vestibule. Fine, a bit muddy.

I went inside the house through the back door. I bent down and pushed the inside flap into the opening.

Again, nothing. I could see the wireless sensor I’d attached to the back of the outside flap. I reached through the vestibule and detached it with my free hand. It had sufficient charge. I put it back and, still reaching through the wall, swung the outer flap back and forth a few times. I checked the app on my phone. Each time I swung the flap the sensor count ticked up. I let the inside flap close and got up. The floor was a little muddy from the cat, but that was it.

I went back outside and stood there thinking. Nothing. The cat came high-stepping around the side yard. It glanced at me with disdain before pushing its way into the house. I walked around to the front terrace. Mom was sitting in the open shade, looking up at one of the trees passing through the solar panels. She was utterly unsurprised to see me.

“Isn’t this tree beautiful?” she asked.

“It is beautiful!” I waited until she looked over at me. “Hey, mom, I have a question for you.”

“A question?”

“Do you ever see other cats in the yard?”

“Other cats?”

I shouldn’t have asked. Her easy happiness froze.

She knew enough to know she couldn’t remember. It was like the little wheel spinning when your computer can’t handle a command. I redirected the conversation: “I was just hoping your cat had some nice friends to kill birds with.”

“Oh, friends. Well, a cat doesn’t really need friends.

That’s what I like about cats.”

69

I left and started driving back to Austin. I couldn’t think of anything clearly. At least the traffic was moving along at the same speed, something you experience in Houston often.

The interstate narrows as it moves out from the city, from seven lanes to six and so on. There were two minivans in the two outer lanes about 50 yards ahead of me just as it went from four lanes to three. The minivans came parallel, with the empty lane between. One had a bumper sticker: My Daughter And My Money Go To Planned Parenthood. The licence plate on the other said: WRSHIP. Just as I passed between the two — ​wait: worship or warship? — ​a possibility dawned on me, about the cat.

Mom had left the terrace by the time I got back to her house. Her not answering the doorbell meant she was napping. It took me a while to get in. It’s just a stupid thing.

I’d specified a fingerprint reader for the front door so mom would never get locked out. But it can’t get a clean read on me because of the brand of sunblock I use. Eventually I had to go around to the back of the house and let myself in with a key. Through the open door of her bedroom I could see Mom sleeping. In the kitchen I had to fish around to find a knife sharp enough for my purpose.

I knelt down by the inner cat door and wedged the knife between the flap and the gasket. But instead of pushing the flap into the cat vestibule, I pulled it back up toward me. Then I laid down on my back, and turned on my phone’s flashlight, shining it on the top of the cat vestibule. Each time I’d looked before that surface had been hidden by the flap I’d swung into the wall. Now I could see it clearly. There, gnawed through the plywood lining of the vestibule, was an oblong hole about 10 inches in the long dimension. Through it, you could see a tunnel excavated up into the spray foam insulation filling the wall cavity.

It was clearly the entrance to the burrow of some animal nesting in the wall. Three things crossed my mind as I stared up. First, you can’t just seal an opening like that.

You don’t know if the animal is in or out, what kind it is, or if it has young and you don’t want a trapped animal to die in a wall. Ideally you catch it alive at some pinch point, which here would be the vestibule. But putting a trap there would

Net Zero

○○○

70

David Heymann

block the cat from getting through, and I could see mom breaking a hip trying to let the cat in or out in the dark. I was also thinking that maybe the animal in the wall might have chewed partway through a primary feed between the solar panels and the meter: I was trying to remember how those lines ran. And I was thinking about how to avoid telling my brother.

I slipped out and drove to an electronics chain store — ​you can find one in Houston by turning left or right, or by going straight — ​to get wireless security cameras I could monitor independently. Mom was still in bed when I got back. It took a while to position the cameras and control unit. I needed my brother not to find them. The outside camera was easy: there were tree limbs no one would ever look at facing the cat door. The inside camera I put on the ceiling next to a smoke detector, hoping its presence would seem normal. I plugged the transmitter in behind the refrigerator, then synched it to upload from the house network.

I got back to Austin in the late afternoon. I made some food, called up the cameras on the studio monitors in my home office and linked them to a digital video recorder.

The reception was eerily perfect, like on Homeland. At one point the cat slunk out. Fifteen minutes later it slunk back in, stopping to glare up at the inside camera. The counter went click each time. You could sense the sun going down from the outside feed. At one point my brother’s shadow passed over the inside flap. He apparently hadn’t noticed the camera. An hour went by. It was hard to just stare at the unchanging screens. I picked up my plate and my phone, and went to the kitchen to clean up.

As I was drying my hands I glanced at my phone.

The sensor reading had changed. I ran down to the office.

For about a minute the feeds were still. Then, from the outside camera, I saw the cat flap suddenly open, and out came a large raccoon. I wasn’t completely surprised, but what followed was remarkable. Every few seconds another raccoon would pop out the cat door and scurry off. Three, four, five, then a mother with three kits. I had clearly already missed some, and more came out. I counted 11 individuals, though it was hard to know, as some went back in. Every now and then, one would come out carrying a big wad of the insulation that made the wall work. This went on for a while.

Then, around 9:30 — ​my brother must have left, so my mom would be asleep — ​the inside feed came to life. Many of the raccoons were coming back from outside, passing through both flaps into the house. I knew where they were going.

We couldn’t count on mom to make food for herself any longer. But she would eat things that were left out, as long as they were partly opened. Every day my brother set out food on the kitchen counter, either for lunch, or in case he couldn’t make it over, for dinner or breakfast. That’s what the raccoons were eating — ​that and the cat food. I called my brother and, without admitting what I was seeing, asked about mom’s appetite. “She’s been eating like a horse — ​everything I leave out.”

I sent him a link to the live feeds. He was quiet for a few minutes. But then he was really kind about it. I love my brother. I mean, this was beyond extreme.

71

We talked to a lot of exterminators. It took a while to hit on the right solution, which, coincidentally, turned out to be a form of torture many countries use. We played very loud music into the walls all day, while the raccoons were trying to sleep. We set up thirty wireless speakers, turned against the walls all over the house, streaming acid rock from a satellite feed. The assault lasted three days. We got mom noisecancelling headphones. I tracked the raccoon outflow with the cameras — ​there were 18 animals in all. I asked one of the exterminators about that. He said only female raccoons live in groups, though he’d never seen one that large. “It isn’t normal, but what’s normal?” All the exterminators I’ve ever met are so laconic.

Once the raccoons were out, I brought in a crew to strip the exterior walls from the inside, tracking the labyrinth of tunnels and dens that had been carved in the insulation.

It was a mess. We eventually had to reinsulate a third of the house. I did the energy calculations: spot on. I also lined the cat entrance with stainless steel plates.

I edited the videos into a continuous loop — ​in it the raccoons go in and out of the house endlessly. I put it on one of the “fireplace” TVs, circulating with a loop of family photos we’d set up hoping it would help mom remember. She reacted to the clips with unadulterated joy. Every time a raccoon would pop out she would start laughing. It was charming. I couldn’t know what mom was thinking exactly, but all of those animals in her walls clearly pleased her. Gradually — ​ I can’t explain this — ​they came to please me too.

“So that was all women living together?”

“Mom, sorry: which women?”

“The raccoons.”

Net Zero

○○○

72

David Heymann

“Yes, female raccoons.”

“That was all female raccoons living together?”

“Yeah, all females. It isn’t common, but it happens.”

“Oh, like the war then. All the men were gone, and the boys had to hide. But then the boys came back.”

I hesitated. I looked over at mom. She was beaming.

73

V īn be r

Ve nt s

CROSS-SECTION

A PERFECT

62 ↞

74

Vents Vīnbergs is an architecture graduate from Riga who works as a cultural critic.

He is the author of more than 200 publications—essays, reviews and interviews— in Latvian and foreign media, and in books by professionals in architecture and contemporary art. As a child, Vents was very afraid of loud and ugly Soviet appliances, so he still treats every technological device with suspicion and caution.

75

A perfect cross-section

It is customary to think about space and ecology teleologically — as if there were a prearranged, structured and “useful” form of coexistence and conditions suitable for all living creatures.

This is why traditional ecological thinking tends to advocate for the preservation of this “natural order” and raises the alarm if things seem disrupted.

Of all the living entities participating in this “strange universal orgy” (a metaphor by the Italian philosopher Emanuele Coccia) and sharing this common space as we constantly interact with and transform one another, humans have the greatest claims to territory. Moreover, since Descartes and the subsequent heavyweights of modernity and the Enlightenment, who tried to describe the “humane” as something inherently different from the rest of the living and non-living world, our species’ struggle for space has become much more aggressive. Participating in this struggle as tools, weapons and as “independent” participants, demanding their physical manifestation and place in the common space we share, are ideas. Space is recaptured from the “wild” in the name of “civilisation” ​​ and “order”, and this is achieved through technology, one of the manifestations of which has always been architecture. Many buildings have been built since the beginning of civilisation in the name of an idea — whether to demonstrate power; to mark conquests on borders; or to solidify doctrines of faith, tradition and social constructs. Some buildings have been built to produce new technologies to sustain such ideas. Some things are built to stimulate the economy or increase profits; some things are removed to make room for new ideas, while other things are protected and cherished as icons or symbols of cultural history or identity. These are all ideas with strong claims to space. To paraphrase the clever slogan of this exhibition, one could say: “It’s not for you! It’s for the idea!” Where people have forced other living beings and natural entities to step aside and make space, humans themselves have also been forced to step aside and free up space for a

things fallen 76

s have n flat

77

78

Vents Vīnbergs

temple, a monument, industry, or infrastructure for the “exchange of ideas”, even if all this is intended for “our own convenience, safety and protection”.

Until recently, one of the high priests of “civilising” this living space was the architect, so the concept behind this year’s Latvian pavilion seems to me simultaneously paradoxical and intriguing. It raises concerns that technology’s rapid development has made it an equal competitor in the fight for physical space and no longer just a necessary and utilitarian means for the comfortable use of space. These concerns may resonate with anyone concerned with the possibility that artificial intelligence — a technology with its own capacity to act and create — might become an independent being in the world and an even greater influence on physical space. Humans could become a resource in this new world, similar to how humans have exploited the rest of nature in the past. This feeling of anxiety amidst architects might come from the fact that the ideas that have “traditionally” defined their profession, and that were implemented through the technological solutions and emotional impact of buildings, are gradually being replaced with other ideas that entail different uses for physical space. Conventional notions of how an architecturally and technologically organised space should look and function are being either driven out or pushed aside, being made more akin to decorative elements or heritage with sentimental value.

The modernist revolution, which happened 100 years ago, could be described similarly, referencing the ideas of “form that follows function”, Le Corbusier’s purism, “a machine for living in” and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s ideas of “less is more”, and we could assume that our seemingly total dependence on technological progress is a causal continuation of this revolution (and easily write off postmodernism as a peculiar attempt to revisit the history of pre-modern ideas). However, perhaps the modernist sense of the world is right

79

A perfect cross-section

now taking a more severe hit than ever before as it becomes a caricature of itself. Albeit in the name of public welfare and a “better life”, both regulations and engineering solutions have become very cumbersome. Not to mention the extent to which technological progress and the colonisation and appropriation of common space is determined by the logic of late capitalism, in which, as the British critic Olly Wainwright ironically puts it, “form follows finance.”

(Furthermore, if one wants confirmation that technological progress won’t make technology cheaper or take up less space, one need only look at the cross-sections of architectural projects that are swarmed with utilities.

The situation is even more dire in the context of mobile gadgets and so-called smart technologies, because a large part of society is unaware or unwilling to notice how much space we are losing to the server farms and communications infrastructure needed to provide data transmission, storage, and power). The true crisis of modernism and of modernity is characterised by technology that produces more technology, and the use of technology for the sake of technology. The idea of man ​​ as the measure and centre of all things has fallen flat, perhaps not because we are gradually beginning to realise that we ourselves are part of the whole of living nature, but because we are beginning to feel anxious about the prospect of humanity becoming an object of enslavement, in much the same way as we have enslaved the world outside ourselves.

In that sense, the situation even seems hopeful.

Because this opens up the possibility for empathy towards other beings, for us to seek solidarity with them, remembering the coexistence that all living and non-living things shared before the explosion of civilisation and the anthropocentric worldview.

In this regard, architecture has a certain advantage and a potential to flourish. Because even though it is largely based in the world of ideas and driven by socialisation and communication (which is rapidly colonised by virtual technology, with its dramatic but largely

80

Vents Vīnbergs

invisible impact on the environment), like humans, architecture can never be completely detached from physical space. One way to substantiate this inextricable link has been the mostly metaphorical attempt to apply Richard Dawkins’ concept of the extended phenotype to humans; it is mostly applied to technology in a general sense (i.e. any tool in the hands of humans) and the built environment, comparing it to an anthill, a bird’s nest or a raccoon’s cave. Although a much stronger argument for a possible way out of technological dependence, and the reason why architecture never succe­ eds at becoming as refined, rational, precisely targeted and enslaving as an iPhone, is human spontaneity, the ability of all life to adapt to the rules of its environment, and a simultaneous instinctive ingenuity in finding ways around these rules. Architects are often offended or hurt when people use the spaces they cleverly designed for purposes other than those that were originally intended, or when they arbitrarily try to solve an acute functional issue themselves or give free rein to their creativity in vernacular form, which has more to do with survival in the physical space than the ideals and systemic rules originally conceived by the architect. “Find your hacker within” McKenzie Wark, an American thinker, once wrote in her manifesto, urging people to revolt against highly monopolised technology and regulatory systems, and I think her words might have meaning for architects’ future and potential. Scientifically researched and based in social reality as they are, human needs will continue to influence the availability of physical space. In my view, the most enduring ideas will be those that leave room for chance, metamorphoses and intuitive lifehack practices. The story of the practicing architect David Heiman is very illustrative in this respect. They are most likely traditional aesthetic considerations that allow him to co-exist with wild flora, but he is not yet ready to reconsider his territorial claims in relation to raccoons.

But they will return.

81

ī Rv

ns

Jurģis and the window e rd Va 82 Rvīns Varde is a multi-amateur, and now suddenly a writer. He transcribes interviews and curates the “Vardes saraksts” (“Vardes’ List”) column for the Rīgas Laiks magazine. His column consists of peculiar and not-so-peculiar quotations, which is why he reads lots of anything at all. He is interested in architecture insofar as it helps him find the exit, and repeats the mantra “Why can’t they build something normal?” whenever he encounters anything that does not in appearance resemble a small wooden home with a cat and a flowerpot on the windowsill. He sees this as a personal shortcoming but has given up on fighting it, and sometimes considers ignorance an art form.

83

Jurģis and the window

In Talsi, surrounded by a concrete fence, there stood a boiler house, puffing out chimney smoke like a cigar, exhaling fumes and producing a lot of interest among the local children living in the area. This boiler house was not a house where pots boiled with labels like “Sauce” and “Soup”, but a mysterious place that produced an occasional rumbling sound like a high-voltage wire or a refrigerator shivering in the middle of the night for reasons no one could say. The children used to come and look through the window to see the boilers — ​ something the management weren’t very happy about — ​and it soon became clear that the children would have to be threatened with the police and quickly driven away from the site.

This made the children scatter like a broken string of pearls among the nearby apple and cherry orchards, whose owners threatened them in turn. To resolve this issue, the management decided to position a guard at the boiler house. After all, someone had to monitor the indicators on the boiler apparatus, lest Talsi blow up as the Nazis once intended to blow up Krakow. That was why Oskars, the manager of the boiler house, placed an advertisement in the local newspaper looking for a supervisor. Potential applicants could be students, but seniors would be better, and they were even encouraged to bring a small TV and a stove. A local man, Jurģis, read the advertisement one evening as he was trying to light his stove at home and realised that he had run out of advertising booklets, which he often used for kindling. Standing at the stove in the dark, holding a match in his raised hand like a conductor, he suddenly noticed the ad in the newspaper. As it happened, Jurģis had recently realised that life was preparing him for something big and important and therefore had discarded the fragments of all his other callings, focusing on one goal alone — ​writing his autobiography. The word “autobiography” seemed attractive and modern to him, and he felt that throughout his long life he had accumulated experience that could prove useful to the younger generation. He had served in the Soviet army and his sergeant’s last name was Balodis, he had been in a rowing club, he was a ladies’ man and considered himself a water-diviner and something of a witch doctor, because he had one neighbour who swore that her back was “all fine” after he’d touched it, and all he had to do now was to compile it all in chronological order and write down all the humorous details under some title. So Jurģis had become reserved lately, avoiding the company of his wife and preparing for his creative endeavour. When he had nearly slipped in the bath that evening, he immediately thought to himself that he mustn’t die before his autobiography was finished. For that

84

Rvīns Varde

reason, the ad in the paper not only helped to set a fire in his oven, but also set fire to his intentions, and Jurģis decided to apply for the position so that he would have time to write freely. A friend from the army came to visit Jurģis the evening before the job interview and they drank moonshine with horseradish (a drink the host praised as being healthy because it was an ancestral recipe, and if there was one thing the ancestors knew, it was how to live) and ate dried roe leg.

Jurģis’s wife felt that her husband had been acting funny lately, so she did not object to them having a drink, although she did feel both scared and curious to know the reason for his change of behaviour.

When Jurģis arrived at the boiler house, he was greeted by Oskars, who examined him from head to toe.

After showing him around the area and giving him a brief explanation of his responsibilities, Oskars stated, pointing at the pressure gauge: “On this meter, this red mark must not be exceeded. If it is, come find me.” Jurģis studied the spiderweb-covered device and shared some wisdom: “We had a similar one in the army until someone came up with the idea of soldering a wire into the device to hold the arrow in place. But what happens if it does go off and I can’t reach you?” Reluctantly, his boss said that it was unlikely but that it would be pretty bad if it did and advised him to avoid negative thoughts. It occurred to Jurģis that if it did go off, he wouldn’t be able to finish his autobiography, but then he instinctively decided to heed his superior’s advice and focus on his responsibilities instead: “How does the pressure work exactly?” Oskars shifted from one foot to the other like a man who had been needing to pee for hours and waved the question away, saying that the supervisor didn’t need to know. In truth, he wasn’t sure how the pressure worked himself and no one had ever asked him.

He was more concerned about the overall technical condition of the boiler house, whose equipment had long since become morally obsolete — ​an expression he loved telling people whenever he could. Some figured that this meant that some of the devices were as old as the 18th century, drew charges and read Lafontaine but Oskars did not seem like someone interested in such matters, so he had never bothered to find out and instead chose to spread stories of morally obsolete machinery. Besides, the roof was leaking, which made one wall look brown and crusty, like the surface of an old piece of pastry. The place needed funding and quick, so the manager ran around town, talking to who he considered to be smart people.

85

Jurģis and the window

When Jurgis came home that night, his wife asked him about his first day at his new job, but she did so shyly, without her usual negative remarks, assuming in advance that something had gone wrong — ​that he had surely said something wrong and lost a good job. She even kept her thoughts to herself when she saw her husband drowning his dumplings in sour cream — ​a habit she couldn’t stand, but had been forced to put up with for 24 years. Jurģis muttered that he had been hired, while simultaneously wondering whether in his autobiography he should mention the fact that he could memorise the dates of people’s name days as proof of his hypnotic power over the opposite sex. He decided to think about it some more in the morning, and fished a dumpling out of the cream, although he didn’t really taste it as he had been reflecting so deeply that his taste buds had been robbed of their function. Before going to bed, they each read their respective books. His wife read a crime novel, while Jurģis read about pirates.

The first days at work passed with Jurģis nervously slapping the braces of his trousers against his stomach and desperately trying not to forget a single thing that had ever happened to him — ​he needed to remember it all so he could recount it in the book. The newly appointed supervisor turned his eyes to look at the pressure gauge every now and then, immediately forgetting what he had seen, until his interest in it almost waned completely. Sometimes Oskars would run into the boiler house with an advisor to discuss the necessary repairs and the morally obsolete equipment, but Jurģis didn’t pay much attention — ​he continued to write even in his dreams. Once Oskars brought a man to the boiler house and asked him about a project application, to which the man smirked all-knowingly and said that “everything must be beautiful”, which Oskars received with worrying seriousness. Once the project had been drawn up, Jurģis even glanced at the pile of papers, but didn’t notice any traces of extraordinary beauty. In Europe, beauty was perceived, and funding was granted. For Jurģis, this meant construction workers wandering around the area, the annoying opening and shutting of doors, and cement dust — ​the boiler house had suddenly come to life, like a cemetery before a funeral. He also had to open the gate for incoming cars carrying tin and plasterboard. The boiler house itself had temporarily turned into a boiling pot.

Work on the autobiography went slower than Jurģis had imagined; the writer’s vocation proved difficult. At one point he gave the draft to his wife, but she criticised it no end,

86

Rvīns Varde

saying that she couldn’t understand a thing: what went after what and what followed on from what. The reconstruction of the boiler house, however, went according to plan — ​the documents were kissed by stamps and signed with long scribbles of barbed wire until finally there came a ribbon and the closing jaws of a pair of scissors. Jurģis no longer had to watch the pressure indicator arrow, as nothing in the new building was morally obsolete anymore. Suddenly, he even began to feel proud to work in such a beautiful house. He dragged a rough finger over a tile joint, knocked on the shiny metal of a boiler, which was reminiscent of apparatus for making moonshine, and solemnly took a deep breath. Even the chimney smoke seemed to have become clearer than before.

One evening, Jurģis was walking home after a shift, juggling several potential morals to his autobiography in his mind, when an upset neighbour ran up to him. The neighbour questioned him about a certain window in the boiler house, but Jurģis just shrugged as he hadn’t heard anything about it himself. As soon as he stepped through the door of his house, the topic of the window came up again. His wife told him about a story on television, about an article in a newspaper, about the outrage and confusion of her friends, and demanded to hear her husband’s thoughts on the matter.

Jurģis tried to brush her off like a mosquito, but he sensed that something truly serious might have happened. And, sure enough, something had, because he was intercepted at work the next morning by camera-wielding journalists, who shoved a matchstick-like microphone under his nose so unexpectedly that, for a moment, Jurģis was left completely stunned. A journalist pointed to a window on the second floor of the boiler house that looked like it had been built in front of a wall of bricks and asked him to comment.

Gasping for air like a trout thrown out of a stream, Jurģis suddenly felt recent events fall into place in his mind like a mosaic; it was satori. Then, suddenly becoming a little too self-confident, he loudly said: “I told them: who works like this?! People will laugh at you. But the know-it-alls wouldn’t have it, why would they want my opinion? I remember we did repairs in one hospital. We had to finish them within a week…” The journalist tried to stop him, but it was no longer possible; he just started talking louder, and his cheeks became hotter: “And one fool got the proportion for the filler and the hardener wrong. We spent two days filling in all the holes, but the filler did not harden! Exactly what we have here!” At this moment, Jurģis closed his eyes, as if to emphasise that he wasn’t to blame in either case. When

87

Jurģis and the window

the supervisor parade-marched to the boiler house, he was wholeheartedly convinced that the reason for the botched window was that no one had heeded his advice or experience. Oskars looked as depressed as a broken umbrella in a trash bin. He was even forced to turn off his phone because he got tired of explaining the function of the brick window first gently, then formally, then hotly. During one of the conversations, he said that the window performed the function of beauty, which he later regretted, chewing the tip of his pen and breaking an eraser in half. Nervously pacing around the room like a gander, he told Jurģis that there was no other way because this was a European-financed project, and so everything had to be both beautiful and well-coordinated. As he listened, Jurģis smiled mysteriously and then, without listening to the end of the sad tale, he bolted to his supervisor’s chamber and sat down at his notebook, whose surface had become crumpled by its owner’s sweaty hands and boasted that it had only a few remaining white pages.

The attention the window received was so great that whenever the townspeople met, all they had to do was open their mouths to immediately find whoever they were talking to nodding their heads in agreement and pointing towards the house with the smoking chimney. They all knew that European money was being wasted, as usual; it would have been better if it had been given to them instead. Similarly, it was also clear as day that, if they had been given the authorisation to spend these funds, such nonsense would never have happened. Oskars began taking prescription sleeping pills because he saw the devilish window appear in his dreams every night, rotating slowly like a product being advertised on TV. So he decided to seal the window with film, hoping that the people of Talsi would forget about it, but he came up against objections that it could only be done in the summer. One morning he even came up with the story that the window had been built on the wall with the intention to draw everyone’s attention to the boiler house’s new image — ​this was the only window of its kind, after all — ​but then he became so saddened by his own false sense of optimism that it was difficult to express in words. The only one who seemed to emerge from the situation victorious was Jurģis. He patrolled around the boiler house several times a day and lingered at the newly built window every time. If he met a neighbour or a passer-by, the guard shared his version of the incident, adding new details. That was why the title of the last chapter of his completed autobiography was “The Legendary Window of the Talsi Boiler House and the Disgrace Surrounding It”.

88

89

R ūs e

A

ija

Long-term energy efficiency through understanding & knowledge 82 ↞

90

Aija Rūse holds a Master’s degree in Environmental Management and Social Anthropology. She has accumulated a wealth of experience through local and international environmental, construction and energy efficiency projects. In these projects, she often works with municipalities in all regions of Latvia, in recent years mostly in Vidzeme. She likes to live in old buildings that have modern technology integrated into them.

91

Long-term energy efficiency through understanding...

Although, at the national level, Latvia respects the goals of the EU environmental policy, by, for example, currently actively working on the National Climate and Energy Plan for 2021–2030, the attitude of local municipalities to the matter is still one of resistance. They oppose climate policy initiatives whenever they can and are afraid to change anything, thinking that the issue is an abstract one that has been forced upon them. Meanwhile, the targets for emission reduction in Europe are becoming increasingly ambitious. Most recently, in early 2020, the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, announced that a climate policy or “Green Deal”, is the new European growth strategy for achieving a climate-neutral economy by 2050. This is an absolute priority, and a large part of the EU’s long-term budget will be allocated to support the initiative.

When thinking about the resistance we’ve observed thus far from Latvian municipalities and municipally owned companies, it is essential to take into account the historical aspect: energy resources became easily available and relatively cheap in the post-Soviet countries only 30 years ago. Many places in Latvia still use the heat supply infrastructure built at that time, and this fact promotes the equally outdated notion that resources are inexhaustible. There are many small heat supply systems in Latvia whose heat consumption data in energy units is neither collected nor analysed. But it is this information that gives us an idea of how efficiently we are using our resources. The only exception is insulated buildings, but the data collected on their heat and electricity consumption is very rarely analysed. Instead, they are merely submitted in the reports regarding the spending of funding granted and achievement of the promised reduction of emissions. The idea of ​ installing meters in boiler houses and municipal buildings is perceived by municipal employees, and sometimes even management, with considerable scepticism because such meticulous accounting would make it much easier to detect uneconomical activities and overconsumption of fuel. Others

92

Aija Rūse

just don’t see the point in making changes and want to do everything the old way. We lack data, and for this reason the budget for the heating and management of municipal buildings is allocated on the basis of expenditure over the previous year, regardless of whether the winter was colder or warmer. In buildings without a data monitoring or control system, the indoor temperature is rarely adjusted to the outdoor air temperature. This fact is confirmed both by the information indicated in municipalities’ energy plans and by the information collected by several schools in Vidzeme on the consumption of heat supply resources over the last three years. The programme I just mentioned — “Efficient Energy Consumption in Educational Institutions” — indicates that a large proportion of schools are overheated, especially during the autumn and spring periods.

According to the municipal officials responsible, the situation is similar in kindergartens.

This unwillingness to change anything and sceptical attitude towards the possibility that municipalities and municipally owned companies might be inefficient in their use of resources has come about for several reasons.

Currently, under the existing regulations, one may apply for state support to improve a building’s energy efficiency and this may also include the refurbishment of the building. It is good that the state is offering an opportunity to put the housing stock in order, but this situation creates a misleading notion of energy efficiency. In this context, it is useful to critically examine the widespread perception that energy efficiency measures are expensive because, if the total expenses also include refurbishment work, which in no way reduces the building’s heat or electricity losses and only increases the total renovation costs, it is incorrect to attribute the total costs per m2 to the building’s performance and gains in terms of energy efficiency.

In most cases, state aid programmes strictly regulate the direction and implementation of energy efficiency measures and

93

Long-term energy efficiency through understanding...

the technologies that are permitted to be used in the process. On the other hand, the logic of resource efficiency dictates that the most appropriate solution must be found for each situation, but universal requirements limit this goal. Inappropriate use of technology creates additional costs — high heating and electricity expenses or expensive maintenance. But the popular view is that you have to take what you can get. A good example of this is the tendency to design buildings with thinner walls when renovating them at one’s own expense as opposed to when the building is renovated at the expense of EU funds. The difference in heat resistance becomes negligible above a certain thickness of insulation. The savings, however, are very evident.

Sometimes municipal employees responsible for energy efficiency do not have the knowledge to decide on what might be the most suitable solution for heating, water heating, electricity supply or lighting. There is a lack of information on the latest technology available in Latvia, and the economic benefits and efficiency it brings, and sometimes there isn’t enough time to give these matters the consideration they deserve. The fact that a lot of information is available only in a foreign language can also present problems. As a result, this can lead to situations where a wrongly chosen solution creates discomfort and a critical disposition towards its original purpose — achieving energy efficiency.

The notion that energy efficiency is only about saving is widespread but untrue. The basic idea of energy ​​ efficiency is to reduce the amount of energy consumed without reducing quality of life. However, as yet there is no mechanism in place in Latvia that would encourage the rational use of energy resources in the long term. Significant energy savings can also be achieved in non-renovated buildings by skilfully adjusting their heat supply systems and making small improvements to the buildings. When buildings are renovated its users also have to change their habits. This is why, when thinking

resist to effic 94

tance y cienc 95

96

Aija Rūse

about buildings, it is essential to remember that each user is important because he or she has a direct effect on its energy consumption.

It is worth addressing everyone who is willing to get involved and encouraging people to make personal choices that might contribute to climate neutrality. It is equally important to explain why climate neutrality is necessary, how climate-neutral policies are implemented and some of the existing support mechanisms that could help in achieving this goal. One should remember that, although we are all energy consumers, only a few of us have a technical education and a deeper understanding of what can be done to improve the matter. Most consumers limit themselves to the understanding that a good room is a bright and warm one and acquire their knowledge from the media or their friends. An interesting example of promoting awareness is the school programme I mentioned earlier, which encouraged teachers to go on an excursion to their school’s boiler house. After the trip, the teachers admitted that, despite having worked at the school for several years, they hadn’t once considered how the school was heated or that they could make the process more efficient by changing their habits.

Energy efficiency is still a new concept in Latvia. The Energy Efficiency Law was adopted only in 2016, and so we still lack knowledgeable specialists. Very rarely does a municipality have even one employee who either permanently or on a task-by-task basis fulfils the duties of an energy consumption manager. In Sweden, for example, the administration of the Dalarna region refused to even bring up energy efficiency with the municipalities until they had each hired a competent specialist or energy efficiency manager who would dedicate at least a third of their total working time to the subject. Without professionals directly responsible for energy consumption improvement, the situation will not improve. The problems we face in Latvia are exactly the same in other countries; the only thing that differs is the solutions. For this reason, educating oneself,

97

Long-term energy efficiency through understanding...

seeking like-minded people in other cities and counties and learning from the experience of neighbouring countries with similar climatic conditions is key. If we possess reliable knowledge of what is needed for a building to be truly energy-efficient, it will be possible to better assess each individual case and decide what improvements and technology are necessary or unnecessary. This will also make deciding upon the most suitable financial model easier, give designers a clear task in anticipating the latest, most efficient and environmentally friendly technologies, and ensure that buildings are used correctly after renovation. The experiences of Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Germany and other countries prove that thought-out use of energy resources leads to significant financial savings, provided that the specific circumstances, the most appropriate technologies and energy management methods are understood, and that we have the courage to change our habits and persuade others to do the same. The success and rational implementation of energy efficiency programmes in municipal buildings shapes public opinion on both the way municipalities spend the funding they’ve received and the idea of energy ​​ efficiency in general.

Thanks to various campaigns, educational events and new information about the availability of a variety of modern building materials and technologies, the awareness of municipal specialists is improving every year. Municipalities tend to renovate buildings, replace street lighting, reconstruct heat supply systems and implement other energy efficiency measures at their own expense because then they have more freedom than when they do this using funds they’ve received from the EU. The number of people who become aware of the benefits of participating in climate change policy is growing. For example, in an attempt to save money, a small municipality has begun to turn off the streetlights in its area early in the evenings, then has them automatically turn back on when a bus from Riga arrives and stay on until everyone on the bus gets home. Although this can be time-

98

Aija Rūse

consuming, municipalities have begun to collect and analyse data about buildings; they are increasingly more open to new solutions and do not shy away from experimenting. They have concluded energy performance contracts (EPCs) with construction contractors, in which both the customer and the contractor have an interest in the renovation work being performed well and the final result yielding low energy consumption. By changing their habits over a one-year period, students and teachers participating in the school programme “Efficient Energy Consumption in Educational Institutions” were able to reduce electricity and heat consumption in one school building by as much as 18.52%.

Hopefully, in the near future, innovative and effective climate policy measures will be considered to be indicators of a modern and well managed municipality. Returning to the priorities of the “Green Deal” and the activities of the National Climate and Energy Plan for 2021–2030, one would hope that in order to achieve these goals, alongside the proper use of allocated funding, countries will also develop effective financial and policy support mechanisms at both national and local levels, which, if effectively combined with educational activities, will raise awareness of the factors that hinder or promote responsible environmental policy-making and thought-out use of resources both globally and at a municipal level. I hope that in five years I will be able to say something similar to what a representative of a municipality in Norway once said when speaking about energy-efficient projects built with wood and utilising local raw materials, data monitoring systems and solar energy. When asked about the project, she replied, as if stating the obvious: “How could I not worry? My children will have to live in this world!”

99

M

ār

A House in Venice. Or anywhere else š tiņ

M

in

s ur

ta

100

Mārtiņš Mintaurs is a historian who has a persistent interest in architecture and things related to it. He is familiar with and uses computers, but is suspicious of other technological gadgets that claim to make our lives easier and better organised.

101

A house in Venice. Or anywhere else

I would venture to say that for a modern person, even one unfamiliar with Joseph Brodsky’s Watermark, a house in Venice might prove an ambivalent concept. It could be applied to a specific house in the stone labyrinth that is the city on a Mediterranean coastal lagoon, which has captivated so many storytellers, artists and travellers, but it could just as well be an imaginary home, a dream-like image that exists only in my imagination like a castle in the sky... My reference to Venice is not by chance, because today the romance around this canal city has an air about it not only of nostalgia but also of alarm, due to concerns about the city’s future existence in an era where global climate change has evolved from a theoretical to a very practical concern. Feelings of nostalgia have always nourished the roots of the many- branched tree of cultural heritage, so Venice is doomed to be a symbol of architectural history, its light sometimes reaching far corners of the world. The question that is illuminated and becomes visible in this light is: how do we reconcile life in a historical building with the need to preserve its authenticity?

The question is not as theoretical as it might first seem. In the twentieth century, there was a lot, a whole lot of talk in architecture about the Zeitgeist and the atmosphere of a place, while simultaneously attributing to this Zeitgeist both a destructive and creative influence. One of the characteristics of the modern age is a critical or even negative attitude towards the past, or, in other words, the awareness of contemporaneity as a value being opposed to history, which is felt as a burden. Today, the identity of modernity seems to have really come full circle, because our focus is now on preserving this atmosphere of “history as a burden” in architecture, which must be subject to the demands of the spirit of our age. Modern technology no longer seeks to replace historical substance; it tries to adapt this substance to the current situation to extend its lifespan. Heritage thus acquires a two-fold identity; just like the Roman god Janus, its gaze is fixed on both the past and the future. If this situation were to be expressed mathematically, the result would be zero as the sum of two opposite quantities — ​“plus” and “minus”. And this is exactly the type of result we often see when historic buildings are reconstructed in accordance with human needs.

My memories of the smell of a sunny wooden house on Kuldīgas Street in autumn remind me of the texture of the old coat of paint on it, as standardised and unique as the papillary lines on a person’s palm — ​an imprint left by touching a cool door handle or the railings of the old stairwell, or by the transparent smell of moisture in the yard. Such

102

Mārtiņš Mintaurs

idyllic memories have polar opposites: historical buildings with façades mutilated with plastic windows in the former resort town of Baldone twenty years ago, or a more recent sad sight — ​the restored 19th-century wooden house on Turgeņeva Street in Riga, whose yellow wooden façade now hides an inner shell of porous concrete. Another wooden building nearby did not live to see such a “revival”, and yet another a few blocks further on was destined to spend about a year in agony until it was partially destroyed by a fire.

Yes, buildings are built for human needs — ​for convenience and meaningful use, that much is clear. However, the preservation of historic buildings is not done as a whim of architects, art historians or cultural heritage enthusiasts.

You don’t have to be a romantic or a worshiper of antiquity to realise that the historical appearance of a building is not just a decoration that is secondary to the building’s function. However, it is precisely this “functional” approach that prevails when it comes to insulating historic buildings, as we see in the case of Strenči Hospital, which is by no means the only example. This wasn’t just due to an arbitrary decision by a private owner or a lack of funds — ​instead the requirements of the European funds became a cover for neglecting the spirit of the building, the atmosphere of the place, which is disappearing under the burden of energy efficiency improvements. And isn’t this also a question of “healing the spirit” — ​​healing it from ignorance? If you change a person’s face, you won’t recognise them anymore; remodel the façade of a building and it will become a different building.

Similar stories include the century-old summer houses in Jūrmala or the “transformations” of the 20thcentury interwar period houses in Ogre or in the districts of Mežaparks and Pārdaugava in Riga. There is an alltoo-common practice in Latvia, which seems to make you choose between just two alternatives: a radical reconstruction of a building, preserving an illusion of a decorative “historical” façade, or its destruction. Of course, this has a lot to do with tax policy and its effect on the real estate market. However, all transformations of historical buildings are due to human needs and people’s desire to spend their daily lives in better, more comfortable and safer conditions.

However, it is also a matter of choice, determined by one’s attitude towards historic buildings. Was this always the case? One can turn to history again, for example, the 1980s in Riga. While in newspapers architects discussed the restoration of the Old Town, time seemed to stand still in other parts of the city. The dusty, sinking wooden buildings

103

A house in Venice. Or anywhere else

with rusty tin roofs “preserved” under a coat of dark brown or gray-green paint somewhere in Āgenskalns or Grīziņkalns are today beings from another reality, still trapped in the era of Soviet socialism’s demise. They are memories, still lingering as if by accident, like the hissing dispensers of sparkling water in parks or the barely perceptible smell of almonds in the waiting room at the Central Railway Station. They gradually either disappear from the cityscape or return in genuinely or only seemingly restored form.

However, let the temptation to imitate Marcel Proust remain. Memories cannot replace the needs of today. The landscape outside the window of a 467-series nine-storey khrushchyovka building is reminiscent of modernist architectural notions from the ’70s about what a suitable and favourable living environment was. The open layout is the same as in the masterplan, but it now has green accents, because the trees planted when construction of these buildings began have grown, some of them reaching as high as the top floors.

Some things have changed since then. A couple of years ago, some adjacent houses were packaged in bright orange and yellow-brown heat-insulating cladding, and the glazed balconies are no longer packed with an abundance of various domestic items — ​​a sight which used to bring joy to the heart of all anthropologists, as these would reveal a great deal about their owners’ material quality of life. Other nine-storey buildings around Riga are still waiting their turn, demonstrating the effects of weather and the wear and tear caused by their occupants: dim glass blocks on the exterior walls of stairwells, with veneer patches, patinated expanded clay panels and sun-faded plastic details on the façades.

People tend to ask different kinds of questions; they sometimes ask rhetorical questions that need not be answered.

When will the standardised residential buildings of the 1970s and 1980s become architectural heritage? There is some irony in this question. Maybe they embody a part of the past that people just don’t want to remember, even though it is present in their everyday lives, because they live in those buildings?

Soviet modernist architecture, for those born and raised during that time, often seems disturbing, ugly, or nothing special at all; it is a background that does not highlight but absorbs whatever is different; it is like an inert mass that exists in a self-sufficient reality, waiting until it collapses or is reconstructed. By the way, some buildings from the late fifties on the green streets of the suburbs or provincial centres that have still retained their original cream-colored plaster already seem to remind us of a world that belongs to

104

Mārtiņš Mintaurs

the category of heritage. The changes implemented with the engineering improvements to the standardised residential houses built in the post-war years seem to be a natural addition to their geometric minimalist architectural style.

Furthermore, the critically important resistance to wear and tear of reinforcement structures in reinforced concrete panel buildings actually depends on these improvements. If we return to the issue of the atmosphere created by architecture, then it can be concluded that there are no unimportant details here — ​technological safety and the comfort of a building notwithstanding, the quality of life of a building and its occupants is also determined by the building’s visual image and attractiveness. Authenticity is, of course, a social construct we have created, and yet the power of this illusion is greater than we realise or want to acknowledge. And this is true with respect to medieval cathedrals and historicism hospital complexes, as well as these “residential units” from the 20th century.

105

B lu m b A

by splitting one in half

nd can’t get two elephants r

a

You

100 ↞

106

Andra Blumberga is a professor at Riga Technical University. She used to want to be an architect, but now her daily work is related to two of her passions—systemic thinking and the mitigation of climate change by saving energy in buildings.

Systemic thinking leads to the insight that everything in the world is interrelated through visible and invisible bonds, while the evolution of building technology shows humanity returning to its roots, this time armed with a wealth of knowledge.

107

You can’t get two elephants by splitting one in half

A modern building is an environmentally friendly building. It’s a building that uses as little energy as possible, getting the energy it needs from renewable resources and using technological solutions that are produced in an environmentally friendly way. It must simplify and improve the user’s everyday life. However, this can come into conflict with the building’s architectural and engineering solutions because what was once important may now have become insignificant and vice versa. For example, the heat gains from people and devices in buildings built in the last few centuries make up only a negligible part of the building’s energy balance, but in nearly zero-consumption buildings, they have a very significant impact on the building’s total energy consumption.

Attempts to adapt older buildings to modern standards present several challenges. It is often impossible to prevent heat loss in historically significant pre-Second World War buildings by insulating their exterior walls because their façades are considered cultural heritage.

The same goes for replacing windows, as this must also be done with consideration for their initial design. Equipping pre-war buildings with renewable energy technologies without damaging their historical significance can often prove a real challenge for engineers and architects. Soviet buildings, on the other hand, can be insulated from the outside, but this often results in an urban landscape with stylistically and temporally undeterminable buildings. One of the most significant difficulties and a source of concern for residents in both groups of buildings is ventilation after insulation. Without proper ventilation, building insulation may lead to poor indoor air quality or increased humidity and mould.

Recently built buildings have low levels of energy consumption, but this is often achieved with solutions that limit the architect’s creativity — ​ through requirements that the building must face in a particular cardinal direction and requirements regarding glazed surface areas, shading, heat gain, heating and ventilation systems. In many cases, technical solutions involve

autom the ele 108

mating ephant 109

110

Andra Blumberga

returning to well-known but forgotten techniques, such as designing a building’s exterior walls as a heat accumulator. And this is a new creative challenge: to achieve the necessary emotional impact and give the building an individual character without resorting to overly complex architectural structures.

When the participants of a construction process approach an issue in isolation and each from their respective points of view, they often think that the solution depends entirely on their own personal input. This leads to situations where, for example, the architect is convinced that everything depends on a successful interplay of architectural construction volumes and that the building should have an imposing overall image, while the construction engineer wants a 6×6m grid of columns at all costs. This type of thinking makes both parties think that if they split an elephant into two, they will get two elephants. That is to say, they sometimes believe that various different components of a system can effectively operate autonomously from one another. But in order to truly see the elephant one must identify and understand how the system works as a whole, and this is one of the greatest challenges in the history of architecture and construction.

Architects and engineers need to collectively overcome their fears of insulating pre-war buildings from the inside. This would reduce energy consumption and improve the quality of these buildings without compromising the cultural and historical value of their façades, as was the case with the Strenči Psychoneurological Hospital, for example. The ventilation technology industry is currently experiencing a renaissance and a return to its roots: the complex technological solutions that have been used over the last six decades are gradually being replaced by upgraded versions of solutions that have been known to us for thousands of years. These upgraded solutions are based on the principles of reduced energy consumption and ease of use. But this paradigm shift also

111

You can’t get two elephants by splitting one in half

means that engineers and architects will have to change their approach and way of thinking. Even though the latest trends in building construction show a shift away from technologically complex models whose operation poses major problems for users, many of the solutions that are necessary to maintain automatic systems and simplify users’ lives will most likely be kept. Humankind has purposefully tried to avoid the subordination of people’s daily routines to the needs of buildings by, for example, automating heating systems so people would not have to be tied to their house in order to keep wood heating systems going during the cold seasons.

People seek security and predictability, so their habits are often based on prejudice and a desire to stick to what they already know. In modern times, however, this tendency can lead us astray, and it is with bitterness that we must acknowledge that sometimes the problems of today are simply the result of yesterday’s ineffective solutions. By acquiring interdisciplinary skills and knowledge and learning to work with others in the industry, it is possible to be able to see the elephant in its entirety and to find innovative and creative technological solutions that are acceptable and comprehensible to all parties involved.

Ar

tis

House Service ec Sv

e 112

Artis Svece is a philosopher by education and occupation and has done a lot of work in the field of journalism. He has a wide range of interests, which, if viewed charitably, can be seen as curiosity about everything happening around him, and, if less charitably, as superficiality. This curiosity gives him the courage to express his views about things he is unfamiliar with, such as architecture. His attitude towards devices is very favourable, provided that they are convenient and do not require a lot of attention, which, again, is a bit superficial.

113

House service

I have never wanted to own a house. Not seriously anyway.

I shudder at the thought of having to constantly maintain it, by fixing the roof, cleaning the gutters, painting the windows, figuring out why the basement walls are wet, scheduling an electrician for next week, and trying to convince myself to finally tidy up the garage. I hate all that. I want a home that does not trouble me or interfere with my life. Maybe this has something to do with the fact that my father was a Soviet universal handyman, who could easily switch to being a builder, a plumber, a carpenter, a welder, or an electrician, as necessary. He took care of these things around the house, and I never had to worry about them. I used to feel somewhat ashamed about it, because just like women were once expected to be able to cook, societal norms expected men to take care of the household. I have noticed, however, that these expectations decrease as time goes by.

This change of societal norms was probably influenced by several parallel processes. In Soviet society, where I spent my childhood, people lived in affluent poverty. It was not real poverty, where there is nothing to eat, but a constant lack in one’s state of consciousness. Soviet society was without a doubt a consumer society, albeit in a specific way — ​people longed for material things and often built their status around consumer goods, but these goods were not easily available, and they were not on offer. Everyone had to find them on their own, which in turn required a huntergatherer type of know-how. This knowledge meant, firstly, certain social ties or social capital, which was very useful in the Soviet times for acquiring things, and secondly, certain skills. What you could not get, you had to make yourself.

This required free time — ​a resource Soviet people had a lot of, and, in their free time, people became amateur builders, plumbers, tailors or agriculturists. Something that was of particular value during those times was resourcefulness (in Russian there is the word “smekalka”— ​a clever way of doing something in a situation where at first glance it seems impossible). For example, in 1987, at the end of the Soviet regime, the Latvian architect Zaiga Gaile, and the engineer Māris Gailis, who was later appointed prime minister of Latvia, published a book titled Furniture for Young People, the underlying message of which was that anyone can create a modern environment in their apartment or room: “The total height of the seat is about 35 cm, so if the soft block is 10 cm thick, the plinth must be 25 cm high. It is made of planed boards, blockboard, veneered chipboard or plywood. (…) If all this is too complicated for you, a very good foundation

114

Artis Svece

for soft elements can be made by stacking two sets of bricks and placing boards or thick plywood over them.” (p. 22).

My family had a copy of this book, and I can remember often studying the drawings of mobile seating ensemble and transformable rooms, but I never really built anything myself, not even from bricks.

All these Soviet homemade objects were robust and not amateurish merely by definition. I suppose back in those times people really did consider a box in the corner of a room “mobile furniture”, and there is certainly something optimistic and attractive about the skill to create your own variations on a modern or elegant interior with limited resources. However, looking back, it is easy to also notice a certain primitiveness, ruggedness or naivety about it all, which at that time must have been hardly noticeable or at least neatly hidden.

The drawings in Zaiga and Māris’s book have stood the test of time well enough, but I can’t say the same about the photographs in that same book, which depict examples of various attempts at creating modern interiors in the style of that time.

In a similar way, my father’s “solutions” have repeatedly been met with surprise from modern professionals.

When the Soviet regime collapsed and the free market flooded Latvia with a wealth of goods, one of the first things people rushed to do was renovate their apartments. A peculiar standard of quality, colloquially called “Euro-renovation” (LAT: eiroremonts), emerged. The name refers not only to the use of imported (“European”, not Soviet) materials and the semi-sterile interior design you could imagine seeing in a mediocre hotel, but also its costliness. Not everyone could afford a Euro-renovation. Ideally, you didn’t actually do the renovation yourself, but instead entrusted the work to professionals. In reality, however, most had to figure it out on their own, and the remark “the place looks like it’s been Euro-renovated” was just about the highest praise an amateur could receive.

However, this wave of post-Soviet repairs was also the last spark of Soviet DIY culture. In any case, it was no longer a culture that united the whole of society. Gradually, middle-class and qualified professionals emerged, with a different understanding of quality work, time, and even gender roles. It came to be the case that having a knack for fixing things around the house was commendable, but knowing nothing about it was fine too. The middle class began developing its own rituals, the most typical of which were conversations about handymen. You can never get hold of them, they are expensive, they lack discipline, and their tastes

115

House service

are pathetic and ridiculous. At the same time, you cannot do without them, because who is able to keep track of all the products, equipment, technologies and options there are to choose from? In the Soviet times, there was one brown colour for the floor, which was used to paint said floor, but suddenly, even painting the floor became difficult. Social change, the free market and technology all had a role in the marginalisation of amateur culture.

At the same time, the fact that exchange of information on how to build something became replaced by exchange of information on the ways and vices of handymen is not just a sign of decadence. In truth, the maintenance of one’s home as an amateur hobby did not disappear; it was rather its nature that changed. What used to be about craftsmanship has now become a management industry. The primary task of the owner of a house or apartment is to work with people and the primary skill one now needs is communication. Alongside their main occupation, everyone now has to be an amateur manager. Gender is of secondary importance. But the results will be exposed to social judgment, nonetheless.

In my opinion, amateur home managers are going to face hard times in the medium-term. The reason is technological development and changes in the way we think about houses, which in turn create several other problems.

The functions of the house as an object have increased over time. It used to serve more or less as protection from the environment; today it provides a whole range of services. We can no longer just bring fire or water into the house, or just let in some fresh air, etc. The house itself must be equipped so that it is possible to turn on the lights, charge your phone, connect the dishwasher or set your desired climate. The house is the whole set of infrastructures for these services. The fact that it is a set and not a system makes it amateurish. However, this has created a number of issues, for which you can no longer simply ask for the help of a plumber or electrician, because the solutions are too complex.

The notion of ​​a smart home entails it being a unified system. The problem, in my opinion, is not that it would be difficult for a person to learn to use this system, but that if something breaks down within it, then, taking into account the modern distribution of labour and responsibility, no one knows this system as a whole. In any case, that person can’t be an amateur home manager. In fact, what results from the idea of a ​​ smart house, in my opinion, is that the house becomes a service. It cannot be built and then left to the improvisations of an amateur owner. Its management cannot

116

Artis Svece

amount to one person being responsible for a smart heating device, another for electricity in general, another for plumbing, and their cooperation being coordinated by the homeowner. It is unthinkable to imagine one crew of professionals putting hundreds of wires in all the walls, but the next not knowing where to find them; or one crew installing software that another wouldn’t know how to operate. In my opinion the logic of technological development, as far as it is possible to understand or predict, seems to suggest that we must abandon the idea of ​​a house as an object controlled by its amateur owner. It must become a service like, say, an Internet connection, which just runs in the background and never requires your attention, unless you have a special interest and the necessary skills to tamper with it. Most likely, the idea that a house is an object that is built and then handed over to the owner for his or her use will remain for a while. For amateur home managers, this entails suffering and problems — ​​social norms will demand things from them that they can’t really deal with. But social norms, as is well-known, are not always instrumentally rational. And they are subject to change. If it once seemed obvious, for example, that a car was a piece of family property, which should be kept at home, and which basically functioned as a mobile extra room, the possibility that self-driving cars will become a public service now seems rather real, although perhaps not immediately feasible.

The house as a service will undoubtedly pose a number of social challenges, some of which we are already familiar with from discussions about Internet security or the right to repair and modify electronic devices. I want to draw your attention to just one of these challenges. Modernists flirted with the idea that the house was like a car, they gave up decorativism in favour of functionality, but notions of what makes a space elegant or cosy are still rooted in 19th-century examples or ones from even longer ago. Even in the age of modern smart homes, not much has changed.

We are willing to look at sofas, chandeliers or paintings, but we want to hide wires, pipes, radiators, and even electronic equipment wherever possible. The notion that a wall decorated with pictures, ornaments or books is cosier or more tasteful than a wall with wires visibly going across it is not self-evident; it is a definite choice based on a bunch of assumptions and norms that still link the 19th and 21st centuries due to inertia. In my opinion, this inertia in our notions about cosiness and desire to hide the technical infrastructure in our homes does exist, although, in practice, we usually

117

House service

observe it to varying degrees. Some well-known architectural experiments, such as Richard Rogers’ best-known buildings, have not changed these notions much. We can bear to notice, say, light switches, but we don’t want to see ventilation ducts, we install radiators in the floors, we hide TVs behind paintings, and refrigerators behind wooden panels.

Perhaps smart home technologies exacerbate this contrast. The technology-free interior is a façade that hides extremely complex technical infrastructure. Of course, I have no intention to try and predict technological developments, and it may turn out that smart home systems become more and more virtual to the point that there is simply nothing to hide, just as computers have become smaller and smaller in recent decades, and so the problems I mentioned will just disappear.

However, at least for now, the desire to live in the scenography of previous eras seems extremely inconvenient and wasteful.

I do not think that this problem can be solved by looking for a way to present the technological aspects of a smart home in an aesthetically acceptable way. To some extent, this would be another attempt to disguise the technological nature of the smart home and conjure up an illusion of the preindustrial era, no matter how incoherent or expensive that may be. I am not saying that a smart house should be ugly or that the work of the designer should from now on be entrusted to electricians and plumbers, but I think there is a contradiction in our notions of home and smart home functionality, which is analogous to the contradiction between the home as an object and the home as a service. In my opinion, the house as a service needs a new design. It doesn’t need aestheticization, but a change in aesthetics. A new understanding of space, interior, cosiness, design and functionality, accessibility and concealment, the stable and transformable, created specifically with the smart home in mind. In this sense, in my opinion, the architecture of the smart home has not even begun.

118

119

Sa

lm

n h ce olo

a

M ah

t r ms a

t —

gy, peo p

{1}

What makes a home

le or architects?

112 ↞

120

Dr. Maha Salman is the Chair of the Interior Design department at Yorkville University in Canada. Her research focus is on vernacular architecture, sustainability and human behaviour in the built environment. She uses technology at work and all aspects of her life.

121

What makes a home smart — technology, people or architects?

As early as the 1920s, architects were questioning the static nature of their living spaces and whether they could become more flexible and responsive to user needs. During the 1990s, sustainability as a concept became a worldwide buzzword in almost every area: economy, agriculture, politics, social justice — you name it.

Architecture was no exception.

Generally, there has been a preconceived image of sustainability in architecture: that of buildings augmented with high technology (hitech). In the past few years, sustainable buildings with high technology have come to be known as smart homes. Such dwellings are commonly perceived as spaces that have been made more energy-saving, convenient, safe and easy to use thanks to connectivity and remote control. What users expect from a smart home (and what manufacturers aim to deliver) is increased comfort, reduced human intervention and automated task completion. One upsetting effect of such living spaces is that they make occupants dependent on smart technology and enforce a passive role on them, as the ambient environment actively takes care of trivial chores such as turning off the lights when people go to bed.

Such homes are deemed smart because of the layers and layers of sensors and actuators that control all aspects of the home to make it more comfortable and sustainable. For example, they turn off unnecessary lighting, close windows that occupants may have carelessly left open and perform other automatic operations to limit energy consumption. In this way, technology is making smart homes more sustainable.

However, there is something that needs to be asked: doesn’t technology encroach upon human agency due to its exceedingly active involvement in managing the human space? {1} Balstīts uz 4. Starptauti­ Technology definitely plays an skajai konferencei par informācijas un komunikācijas active role in smart homes, tehnoloģijām ilgtspējai sagatavoto rakstu «Ilgtspējīga un perhaps a too active one, and vieda: viedās mājas būtības occupants play an exceedingly pārskatīšana». Līdzautori: Samāra Sabī, Kornela Unipassive role, which, we believe, versitātes doktorante informācijas zinātnē, un Dr. Stīvs is a critical problem to be Īsterbruks, Toronto Universitāaddressed. tes Vides fakultātes direktors.

122

Maha Salman

Think of various famous buildings with innovative building management systems that are considered paragons of sustainable smart buildings. What most architects consider the first smart building is Jean Nouvel’s highly celebrated Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris. It is smart because the façade has photosensitive shutters that open and close to control the amount of sunlight and heat that go into the building.

Gorgeous and ground-breaking as they were, the shutters broke down and stopped working within five years of the building coming into operation. Dust got into them, and they were too expensive and troublesome to maintain. This single hardware failure caused this entire system to stop. Now think about smart homes, where you have so much hardware and so much software operating. Can you even imagine how convoluted and fragile the system is? Can you imagine if the manufacturer decided to update the software for one of the sensors, and as a result it wasn’t able to talk to the main control panel? That function now no longer works in your house, and it is possible that at that point in the future, occupants would be so reliant on technology to run their house that they would not know what to do if one part of that technology failed. They may not even know to open windows when there is a draught to let in some fresh air. It is an extreme scenario, but if you are into smart homes, give it some thought.

We are not saying we shouldn’t design smart homes — not at all. What we’re saying is that there are other ways to make homes smart and comfortable while keeping occupants actively and dynamically involved in the house: through vernacular architecture. For me, vernacular architecture means the built environment being created in accordance with the natural environment, site, climate, local building materials and the needs of society — in a way that fulfils people’s physical, economic, cultural and social values. Vernacular architecture is the “mirror” of nations, reflecting place, time and culture. This is the real smart architecture; it was built by people for people — t ​he

123

What makes a home smart — technology, people or architects?

kind of architecture that has developed through time and modified itself through trial and error to fulfil society’s needs in harmony with the ambient environment.

Let’s have a look at an example of vernacular architecture from hot regions. Houses, both as standalone units and clustered quarters, are planned and oriented to get cool air and wind running through the streets. Houses have inner courtyards that are unbelievably cool and airy even when the outdoor temperature exceeds 40 degrees Celsius. There is no air conditioning, and no fans are involved — the cooling effect is wholly based on the right application of the principles of physics in such a way that a pressure difference is created, which drives air through the house. Another essential feature is solid walls, which are thick enough to prevent heat from penetrating the house during the day, and then at night when temperatures drop, as is typical in the desert, they radiate that heat back into the house However, vernacular architectural styles do not rely solely on passive design to ensure comfort. People play an active role, shifting from one room to another as the day goes on, avoiding the sun and following the cool breeze (and vice versa in winter), growing plants for shade and transpiration, dampening outdoor surfaces to cool the air, reusing water for irrigation and cleaning, and layering thick textiles and carpets in the cool months, among other practices. This contrasts noticeably with passive occupancy, where dwellers no longer need to bother with trivial tasks such as turning off the lights, lowering the volume of speakers, turning on taps at lower flows to reduce water consumption, turning on air conditioning, drawing curtains or locking the door. In design for passive occupancy, the ambient environment senses their needs and performs the required chores.

Most importantly, this kind of occupancy is active. Despite all of these mechanisms, the house is not always comfortable everywhere, so occupants might start their day in the courtyard while it is cool, then move in the afternoon to

comfor nowh 124

ortable here 125

126

Maha Salman

one of the perimeter rooms, and then at night go and occupy the roof; they perform different activities at different places and times of the day, they adapt their behaviour to get the most out of the building.

Finally, can we think differently about smart homes? What are the takeaways from all of this? The point is that these passive strategies deployed in vernacular houses are more powerful than the active technology strategies that are being embedded into smart homes. However, does this mean that we need to neglect technology in buildings and go back to vernacular solutions?

Can we design a piece of software that allows architects to incorporate passive technology strategies and sensors along with user behaviour, to make our buildings smarter?

It is definitely not possible to neglect technology; lifestyles and daily requirements have changed, and people’s tolerance of potential discomfort is not the same as it was a hundred years ago. Technology has become part of most people’s daily routines for business, leisure, education and communication. No one can deny the pivotal role technology played in addressing the pandemic situation worldwide.

Without technology, we wouldn’t have been able to get medical support as expected, we wouldn’t have been able to shop online, students wouldn’t have been able to continue their education, and people wouldn’t have been able to communicate with family, friends, and loved ones. Thanks to technology, we were able to go on with our work, we were able to conduct meetings and talk to colleagues, and we were able to keep in touch with the world and keep up to date with news and events. Technology saved us from insanity and being alone; it kept us connected.

These thoughts should teach us an important lesson: it isn’t technology that makes things smart; it is the people who created this technology that are the smart ones. However, and most importantly, people should use this technology in a smart way. We should not let technology guide us, we need to take the lead in using technology for our benefit while keeping

127

What makes a home smart — technology, people or architects?

our active role as human beings: the trick is to use technology in a smart way, not to let smart technology use you.

129

D an ie

lA

.B

ar

After Carbon

{1}

130

Daniel A. Barber is associate professor of architecture at the University of Pennsylvania Weitzman School of Design. His research is organised around two major trajectories: the first involves an archivally rich revisionist history of architectural modernism, demonstrating the significance of environmental concerns to historical developments in the field. The second involves providing a theoretical framework for architects to engage with the climate crisis. work elaborates on the importance of both technological innovations and cultural transformations in addressing the ongoing climate emergency.

131

After carbon

The opposite of comfort is discomfort. The first of these we seek, the second we try to avoid. Comfort is valued because it promises consistency, normalcy and predictability, which allow for increased productivity or a good night’s sleep. Our collective allegiance to comfort is a form of self-assurance — ​ that we are not threatened and that tomorrow will be like today. Comfort indicates that one has risen above the inconsistencies of the natural world and triumphed, not only over nature and the weather but over chance itself. We can rely on comfort. It will be there when we get back.

Comfort is integral to our designed interiors and to the causal chain that ties together HVAC systems, the fuels that feed them and the carbon emissions that result. Comfort applies to many aspects of living, from the open spaces of the suburbs to the luxury upholstery in cars. In this more general sense, it is tightly bound up with consumption. The thermal conditioning of interiors is of specific interest here because it falls under the purview of architects and because it is invisible and especially difficult to disrupt. Design is part of this causal chain, organising and aestheticising the connection between comfort and carbon.

Comforts are the rungs on the ladder to luxury.

Class distinctions are distinctions of comfort, both broadand fine­grained. They are also economic and geopolitical distinctions. The West, the Global North, the geography of industrialised capital, are the global territory of air-conditioning, with political economies in the 21st century that revolve around access to comfort. The rungs of the ladder to luxury are physical, spatial, architectural and thermal. First comes sustenance; then shelter and protection from the elements; then warmth; and finally, cooling, so as to remain active, healthy and productive, especially in the soup of humidity. After these come layers of precision: filtered air, sealed membranes, sensors everywhere, all the elements of the comfort-industrial complex that aims to wrap itself around the body like a favourite shirt. To be rich means to never be uncomfortable. The poor are awash in discomfort, striving for relief from hunger, from the weather, from being a victim of the unexpected. The struggle for comfort is a struggle for equal opportunity, justice, and conditions amenable to growth and self-actualisation.

Comfort, however, is in short supply. Not because the world is running out of it but because, in the face of the climate crisis, we have to collectively adjust to its going away.

Or rather, architects have to help make {1} Based on an article first it go away, despite all of the challenges published in Log 47, Fall 2019

132

Daniel A. Barber

involved in doing so, despite the lack of real momentum around climate in the field. Interior comfort is specific to architecture, and the scarcity of comfort is something architects will have to produce. It involves a conscious redesign of the built environment . We operate as if comfort in climate-controlled interiors — ​but also in consumption, food waste and travel, etc. — ​is a human right. But the global carbon sink, which is directly related to the provision of comfort, is past full. If we can no longer emit carbon, we cannot be air-conditioned in the same way. Buildings must be conceptualised, designed and built differently. We have to reconsider and renegotiate the terms of comfort and of productivity, equity, quality and culture.

Comfort, like capital, is unevenly distributed — ​not everyone gets to have the same amount. When you have a lot, it is hard to let it go. It is even harder to convince someone to give it up. Comfort feels normal, expected, obvious — ​ deserved. Why not turn on the air conditioner on a stifling, sleepless night? Why ever turn it off? Yet, we need to limit the distribution of comfort, renegotiate it, rather than allow it to proliferate. As the climate crisis renders global asymmetries more extreme, rethinking comfort will force us to critically think through these asymmetries. Who decides who gets to be comfortable? What are the technological, industrial, political and affective contours of asserting such agency?

Designing for comfort has produced stranded assets: buildings conceived and built for HVAC, with sealed curtain walls and robust mechanical systems, have little chance of surviving in a world after comfort. Most of the icons of 20th­century architecture were poorly conceived relative to the thermal interiors and exteriors of the present; they are, relative to carbon, uninhabitable, unrecoverable, unredeemable. Our histories will be rewritten, our principles of preservation and claims of building integrity will be adjusted. We are witnessing the beginning of a slow (too slow) but persistent decline for the hermetic built environments to which we are accustomed. Architects are not trained to design for discomfort. Not yet.

We are no longer protected from the elements. The elements are assailing us, determining our collective future.

The experience of comfort inside is predicated on the global acceleration of climatic instability outside. Interior comfort produces unpredictability. Despite all the claims of the Anthropocene, the geologic “age of man”, we are helpless to transform the atmosphere back to a predictable state.

Or, so far, to conceptualize a human future resilient to the

133

After carbon

unpredictability that we, and even more so our children, are facing. Heating, cooling, and humidity control systems make us comfortable while simultaneously making us vulnerable.

We are, in fact, exposing ourselves to the elements by virtue of these sealed, conditioned spaces.

We live in the Comfortocene, an era defined by a global order predicated on manufactured interior consistency.

This era will be short — ​or rather, human capacity to witness it is limited. Are we really killing ourselves through a demand for comfort? Yes, or at least threatening to. Air-conditioning is a primary medium of this existential threat; conditioning interiors is the carbon-intensive imperative that architects can approach, resist, and reconfigure.

How can design for discomfort attain the status of quality, of value? Designing for discomfort involves treasuring the global collective over the local and emphasizing the capacity of architecture to integrate the geophysical with the geopolitical: to value cities, building spaces, and practices as if carbon mattered. In terms of carbon, in addition to terms of form, theory, and novelty, architects can explore the experience of discomfort.

The built world is contingent. It was built according to specific socioeconomic conditions, collective desires, and cultural interests; it can be unbuilt and rebuilt according to new conditions, new desires, and new frameworks for cultural elaboration. Such reconstructions also reimagine relationships to resources, economy, exchange, and equity.

Architecture’s new ambition should be to condition humans to be uncomfortable.

St en dz en

Ēr

ik s

Forbidden fruit

134 The question is still open — ​is Ēriks Stendzenieks a copywriter with a flair for art direction or an art director skilled in writing? In either case, he has created some of the most seminal visuals in Latvian advertising, as well as some of the most impressive copy. Ēriks has always had a long, personal and slightly complicated relationship with technology — ​ ever since he put a five-inch nail into a socket at the age of 4. As he has gone through life he has learned to operate some advanced machinery, including a microwave and even the controls of his smart house.

Regrettably, at the age of 53, he still hasn’t figured out how to set the clock on an oven.

135

Forbidden fruit

“What the hell,” sighed God. He rose slowly from his white leather chair, a swanky piece of furniture that had seen better days. The upholstery was worn-out and cracked, having over time assumed the shape of its owner’s behind, albeit in inverse. The walls of the office were white, too. In fact, almost everything was either white or nearly so. It was clear that the owner preferred light colours. He was probably a minimalist at heart. In a leisurely fashion, God crossed the room, about the size of the average studio, and walked up to an impressive, brightly lit aquarium.

It contained fine sand instead of water. Inside, a snake lay almost invisible, hanging in drooping rings from a grey, twisting root. God pulled a live mouse from the depths and folds of his bathrobe and placed it in the aquarium, where the snake could see it.

“And so she lives here. Can’t set her free. Not since that time in the apple orchard, as you recall...” he said.

God returned to the table. The fan was loudly blowing air through a somewhat outdated computer case. God turned it off and pushed aside His keyboard, which had a badly worn Let There Be key where an Enter key would normally be.

“We’ve reached a kind of dead end, He said to His interlocutor, who was sitting in the middle of the room.“ His interlocutor — ​a tall gentleman, seemingly just past middle age — ​barely shifted in his seat. He was leaning back in an office-type chair and rocking almost imperceptibly back and forth. So the chair had a rocking function. And wheels. His pitch-black, combed-back hair was unmistakably dyed, and his eyebrows and eye contours were likewise traced in black. At first glance, the guest could have been mistaken for Till Lindemann of Rammstein, or perhaps for Ozzy Osbourne. After a long moment of silence, once it seemed like an answer was no longer expected, he leaned back some more, running the risk of losing his balance, and ran his fingers through his thick hair, deftly avoiding the horns.

“Oh God,” sighed the Devil.

They were talking about Man, of course. Their wellintended project had at some point gone off the rails, so to speak. But when, exactly? And in what direction? And, most importantly, what was there to be done now?

“I created him in My likeness and after My image, you know. I designed him as a blank page that he himself would fill with good deeds, thoughts and devotion to Me over the course of a lifetime. With compassion, love and fairness.

With growing closeness to Me. We both know what’s come of that. Instead of living free from sin, respecting and honouring

136

137

138

Ēriks Stendzenieks

his author and walking through life straight like a sword, instead of ploughing the field and waiting for the harvest, he has been walking the easy, crooked path for quite some time now. Why plant an olive grove if you can steal from your neighbour’s? He does not want to become like Me through striving, effort, repentance and rejection of temptation. No, he wants to be like Me in order to perform miracles. Cheap stage tricks. Why ask God for advice when you have Google?

Why learn telepathy when you have phones and Skype? Why search for your own answers when you have Siri? Why torture yourself with attempts to master teleportation through the power of the spirit, when you can just hop on a plane?

Why strain your soul when you can just press a button? In the best case, the button is on a TV remote or a home climate control system, not on a nuclear suitcase. And you, Satan, are responsible for a great deal of this.”

“My friend, you’re missing the point. First of all, I am and always have been the one keeping Man from getting closer to You. If he becomes You, he will replace You on the Heavenly Throne, said the Devil, casting his gaze over the white chair. He’ll say, anyone can be God. I lay traps. I tempt them to drink 14 pints of beer where one would have sufficed. I make them send nudes to their exes while drunk at four in the morning. I am the master of sin and regret. They wake up in the morning, and before they have even brushed their teeth, they fall into a pit of regret for having once again failed in their spiritual ascent to the peak of Your Everest.”

“Go on, go on. After all, I did send you as my fallen angel. Sorry if I was too harsh. ‘Pack your bags and get out of the Garden of Eden’ is not exactly the best message.”

“Yes, I will go on. By the way, You have excellent altar wine. We don’t have that in hell. We only have Jagermeister and beer. Makes up for 1900 years in hell.”

“It may be time for Me as God to reassess my role in Man’s everyday life. Yes, respect may have waned. Hell, it’s easy for you to talk. They don’t want God; they want to be God. Do you know how much money there is in the 1:1000-scale-model business? They buy and construct entire countries in a 3 × 3 meter format. They decide whether cities will stand or fall.”

“Well, this is our creation’s feeble attempt to step into Your shoes, or mine. Sweaty, tense, towering over a 1:1000-scale city, they feel all-powerful. Like God, they can level it with a flick of the wrist. OK, that might be being God Lite, but still. And don’t panic.”

“I remember You poking at that Let There Be key on Your computer,” the Devil continued (pointing at God’s PC 286). “Light, water, earth, rock’n’roll and so on. It doesn’t work. But now listen. I have always respected Your ambition to be omni-everything. That’s why my temptations for Man are merely traps. They are of his own making, and he keeps falling into them. And he always will. You want to work miracles? Sure, but your miracles, dear Man, are nothing more than poor imitations. Artificial intelligence? Sure, for answering trivial questions. “When does the bakery close?”

We’re both here to give our project the illusion that he is an embodiment of You and me, of God and the Devil. Man makes reality shows. Man likes that the Kardashians have big behinds. Man makes shows where celebrities cook omelettes. Man cuts meat with a knife. Man stabs his wife’s lover with a knife. Man invents the nuclear power station. Man bombs Hiroshima. Man turns theoceans of the world into liquid plastic. There are a million examples.”

“Go on, Devil, go on, your silver tongue knows no equal. (I shouldn’t have given you that knack for sweet talk).”

“Well, so... Don’t You feel better now? Don’t You have more spare time? You’ve been holed up in this office 24/7/365 for almost 2,000 years. Each minute, a million prayers, lamentations and demands. From “rid us of the plague” to “protect this flock to “bless this yacht”. I won’t even get into the beginning of the 20th century, when Your emissaries on Earth — ​sergeants, holy fathers and so on — ​blessed bullets, bayonets, bombs and grenades to kill as many enemies as possible. You must agree — ​all this technology is freeing up a lot of time for us both. We can just lean back in our chairs (incredibly, the Devil leaned back even more).”

“Damn! You said out loud what I’ve been thinking for a long time, — ​God stroked his silver beard.”

“I, the Devil, am so sick of hearing about the goodness of faith, and the evil of science. Or the other way around. But we must have patience. The faithful are digging a tunnel in one direction. The educated are digging another in precisely the opposite direction. I have a strong suspicion they’ll eventually meet. Just like the Channel Tunnel from Britain to France.”

“I can already feel it’s going to get hot! Because let’s face it: unlike You, God, people — ​faithful and educated alike — ​only care about themselves. Man can cosplay as You all he wants, but he is not destined to become God. Given

139

Forbidden fruit

“Yes, I am panicking a little,” God said, raising his voice.

140

Ēriks Stendzenieks

Your might, he will use it selfishly and screw things up in ways even I can’t fathom. As soon as he steps into Your shoes, it’s game over — ​should we bet? That’s good news for us — ​we can start the project all over again, this time properly managed.”

“Don’t get ahead of yourself. We still have a lot of time to waste before that happens,” God sipped his red wine.

“Put on some music,” the Devil stretched in his chair.

God picked up the Bang & Olufsen remote. Roger Waters’ voice filled the room: “Welcome my son, welcome to the machine…”

141

El

īn a

Lī

bi

et e

Truth is a good fallback position

142

Elīna Lībiete is an architect at NRJA and an author at Fold. As the curator of the Latvian pavilion, Elīna has documented the creative team’s journey for the better part of two years. She works beset by technology from all sides, just to move to a hut in the woods one day to live without the Internet. She is painfully aware this is rather hypocritical.

It all started with a technologically saturated project for a private house. As per the client’s (in hindsight, rather selfserving) wishes, we equipped the building with the most modern and advanced engineering solutions available.

Despite our best intentions, when the construction was finished, it slowly became clear that these technological solutions had become a burden, not a benefit to the owners. Our clients’ reports about their everyday life in their new home gradually changed from small complaints to nightmarish, Kafkaesque scenes, which revealed the impractical, absurd and sometimes blatantly malignant nature of the technical systems. To avoid going into too much detail and to keep the identity of the clients safe and maintain our good reputation in their eyes, let’s just say that the abundance of technology in this house began to resemble a capricious, unpredictable occupant, whose spontaneous whims our customers just had to learn to live with. And how to live together with the machine? Our engineers shrugged and blamed the programmers, the manufacturers or each other.

143

“Well, at least it looks nice,” we concluded. However, this is by no means the only experience we or our fellow architects have had with uncontrollable technology in architecture. We see these stories popping up more and more often. And it seems that most of the time these technical mishaps come about due to the (not entirely genuine) efforts to increase buildings’ energy efficiency. This is to be expected, as climate change and the efforts to fight it bring new technological solutions and regulations, and their implementation is not always a smooth ride. By the time the efforts against global warming have gone through bureaucracy, development plans, support funds and regulations, and finally reached the end customer, the original idea has changed beyond recognition. The frequency with which attempts to improve energy efficiency are only formal rather than substantive has acquired an almost humorous note in the post-Soviet part of the world. We are actually warming the economy, not insulating buildings. It is not easy to keep sight of the big picture, especially if the big picture is not entirely clear. After several months of intense discussion and bemoaning our struggles with technology in architecture, this is the most reasonable explanation we come up with. And as long as we can hold bureaucratic restrictions as the main culprit, our own professional responsibility towards the matter slides neatly into

Truth is a good fallback position

○○○

144

145

the background. If you squint your eyes hard enough, the specks of sawdust begin to resemble logs.

146

○○○

We slowly become convinced that the main problem in this whole saga of technical nonsense is the lack of a complex, comprehensive perspective. Is it truly possible that devices that have travelled thousands of kilometres and are difficult to manufacture are more environmentally friendly than good old low-tech solutions? If engineers weren’t just crunching numbers in tables, they would have considered whether energy-consuming ventilation systems from China are a better solution than just cracking open a window every once in a while, no? We asked some energy auditors in a roundabout way whether they themselves believe in their own assessments. They gave us an ambiguous grin. ○○○

After several disputes, eagerly desiring to find a quick solution, we come up with an ingenious idea. Each project should be allocated an appropriate CO₂ quota, and architects and engineers should be allowed to meet it in the way they see fit. Without someone looking over the shoulder. Without the mandatory windbreak rooms that everyone hates. We base our argument on the intuitive feeling that the CO₂ footprint resulting from production exceeds the amount of carbon dioxide that energy-efficient technology saves over its life cycle. If you google “manufacturing CO₂ exceeds life-cycle CO₂”, you will see plenty of articles confirming the statement. They are even more convincing if you search the phrase “CO₂ reducing technology useless”.

Our implicit but fervent conviction that the 21st century has tied architecture’s hands undeniably plays a role in our chain of reasoning.

We believe in our own idea for about three weeks.

Those were good weeks. Everything seemed to have fallen into place. Seeking confirmation for our brilliant idea, we consult several experts in energy efficiency and environmental sciences. Some are polite, some point to our tin foil hats and draw parallels with flat earthers, as they completely destroy our illusions. The facts are harsh and there’s no

Elīna Lībiete

○○○

way around it: compared with the CO₂ reductions obtained, the CO₂ footprint of production is minuscule. This applies to PVC panels, ventilation systems, electric cars, prefabricated buildings and almost everything else that falls into a similar category. Our understanding of the “big picture” undergoes drastic but inevitable change.

147

○○○

We are disappointed, angry and sink into endless internal disputes. There is chaos in our daily morning meetings. One day we find ourselves arguing about whether global warming might be caused by volcanoes and burping cows, rather than human activity. Much later, when we discuss this essay, we hesitate as we wonder whether to include this episode in our confession at all. We decide: what happened, happened.

In an attempt to lift our spirits, we come up with several sketches to illustrate the (partly imaginary, partly real) techno-nonsense and our own torn psychological state. One is about a Roomba robot with a traditional Latvian costume glued on top of it. It sifts oats as the robot sucks up the mess it leaves behind. Another has a hair dryer blowing into the Latvian flag as it flutters. We spend some time snickering about a sprinkler system built into a fireplace, until we begin arguing about another sketch, unsure whether a smart door that fails to comply with the unintelligible commands of its drunken owner doesn’t come too close to a beer advertisement. It seems we might’ve deviated a little from our initial goal. ○○○

We continue to meet with various experts. One of them recommends another expert who has written a scientific publication on the risks that bacteria living in hospital ventilation systems pose to patients’ health. Naturally, I read it and like what I see. Ventilation systems benefiting harmful parasitic microorganisms, not humans. It’s not for you, it’s for some germ! By the end of the day, I have convinced all my colleagues that this is important stuff. I become completely preoccupied with the topic, until, fortunately, a patient friend at a bar snaps me out of it. He explains that at best this theory borders on an urban myth, at worst a conspiracy theory. He

Truth is a good fallback position

○○○

refers to other publications which dispute this theory and points out, completely unnecessarily, that one must verify the legitimacy of one’s sources before trusting them. I am overwhelmed by an unpleasant and anxious feeling, as I slowly realise that I’ve been holding a hammer for some time and everything I see looks like a nail.

148

○○○

After long disputes and several attempts at trying to deny it, we have to admit we have been intellectually dishonest. Our CO₂ quota was an attempt to walk away from the issue with our hands clean — ​to reject technology and seem progressive enough for the 21st century, while also managing to look rebellious. Naturally, a house of cards built on desired conclusions will collapse rather quickly. In our case, the desired conclusion was: that technology is undesirable; it takes up too much space. Working from such a starting point, it is possible to make various logical mistakes and then return to one’s desired conclusion.

Unlike circular arguments, honesty is almost always a good position to fall back on. The rapid surge of new technologies and solutions in architecture creates unpleasant experiences for both users of buildings and architects.

However, such unpleasant experiences do not mean that the relevant solutions should be rejected as invalid. As we found out, the link between climate change, energy efficiency and specific architectural and technical solutions is not obvious, especially when the interplay between these aspects and management systems, resource flows, economic constraints and human psychology is also taken into account. And there is no quick fix to this problem.

In an age of technological progress, where there are so many steps between a problem and the device that solves it, it is impossible for a casual observer to distinguish sufficiently advanced technology from magic {1}. The same is true of the many steps and mechanisms that link climate change to the technology that seeks to fight it. However, if the goal of this technology is unclear, the dif{1} This is one of three ficulties and errors that result from this Clark’s laws, formulated in the ‘60s by the science ficprocess begin to look like a curse and, tion writer Arthur C. Clark: “Any sufficiently advanced quite understandably, create resistance technology is indistinguishin the buildings’ users. able from magic.”

Elīna Lībiete

○○○

We begin to focus on this aspect of human experience. We ask our colleagues, friends and clients, and we find a common thread in their reports — ​a misunderstanding about how and why these technical mishaps exist. In their anecdotal accounts, they often mention digital technologies, which, due to their opacity, complexity and sometimes blatantly manipulative design, do not inspire trust in its users, and subvert the traditional understanding of who serves whom — ​ a device complying with the will of its user or vice versa.

149

Drawing parallels with our own experience and efforts to understand why technology seems to pose more problems than it solves, we return to the experts and consult them about our findings. They provide comprehensive, complex, and by no means intuitive explanations, revealing and illuminating the goals and good intentions that drive technological progress. They point to the shortcomings of both the users and designers of these technologies, the tendency to avoid responsibility, and the pull of laziness. They acknowledge that the bureaucratic system, in which people and technology collide, is not ideal, but say that it is the best we are currently capable of as a society. They acknowledge that economic interests often overshadow higher goals and use them for their own benefit. They reiterate the public’s lack of understanding of fundamental global processes and the technology related to them, and remind us that the answer lies in education and communication between different parties: users, designers, technologists, officials and strategists. ○○○

I remember my professor of technology and environmental science at the University of Strathclyde, who tried with apocalyptic zeal to instil in his students at least a rudimentary understanding of the seriousness and inevitability of climate change and our responsibility towards it as architects. It was a valuable, fascinating and deeply disturbing course. Who wants to listen on a weekly basis to how the destruction of the world has already begun; to hear that we as individuals and society are doing too little, and that if we do not immediately radically change our attitude towards the planet, there is reason for fatal pessimism? I cringe as I remember myself signing a student petition asking the dean to for God’s sake assign us a different professor, because it was all too unpleasant and just too much.

Truth is a good fallback position

○○○

I compose a humble email to my professor asking him to comment on a specific techno-nonsense we’ve come up on. He replies that he is happy to hear about my participation in such a project but is too busy developing solar ovens. They will make life easier for the 2.4 billion people on the planet who still cook their meals using fire, as well as help reduce carbon dioxide emissions. I wish him good luck and decide that this is karmic irony.

150

In many ways the structure and content of this book reflects our own experiences and delusions over the past two years as we’ve thought about technology in architecture. We conclude that, first, making mistakes and finding oneself in a state of confusion is human. But it is this process, these winding paths, that lead to true understanding.

The world is changing faster than our brains, which still best comprehend local, small-scale processes, can adapt to.

Although 21st century architecture addresses global challenges that are difficult for an individual to grasp, design and technology still need to respond to the human experience of the average user.

Second, diversity of opinion is inevitable. We have yet to agree on how to interpret the clash between man and technology. However, we hope that by bringing different perspectives together, it becomes possible to build a bigger picture from separate fragments. Even if this sometimes makes us look like a crowd of blind people groping an elephant.

Third, people can change. When the world was overwhelmed by the pandemic, we expected public dissatisfaction with technology in architecture to escalate. After all, it would only make sense that spending so much time indoors would make people more aware of the aspects and shortcomings of technologies that might suggest that they are there for the building rather than for the user. In fact, the opposite happened. Forced by necessity, society adapted and embraced digital technologies at an unprecedented pace. When change is rapid, people recognise that the situation is serious and can adapt accordingly. Unfortunately, the changes that are now bringing more and more technology to architecture are gradual, almost imperceptible. If only we could adapt to them before our own rye fields are ablaze.

Elīna Lībiete

○○○

153

154

155

It’s not for you! It’s for the building (Venice)

156

It’s not for you! It’s for the building

It’s not for you! It’s for the building Mother Nature has given way to Mother Technology. In our homes, offices and public spaces, technology has become a way of life and it has certainly changed the way we interact with architecture. The growing complexity of mechanical and digital systems presents us with new circumstances to adapt to. How do we live together with the everpresent machine? The switch to technologically saturated buildings has brought about not only new comforts, but also resistance and suspicion. The machine is no longer a convenient aid — it is now an integral part of architecture. Tangles of devices seem to encroach on diminishing living spaces.

Smart solutions produce dumb results. At times, the machine imposes its own rules, alienating people from the spaces designed for them. Some people might view this as dystopian, believing technology has gone too far. But as with most arguments claiming that something has gone too far, the real issue is fear of the unfamiliar.

Our relationship with technology is ambivalent, contradictory, and often fraught with hypocrisy. From within our carefully conditioned fossil-fuelled interiors it is easy to forget that, after all, machines are our own creations, made for our own good. While architecture is struggling to find its relevance on the brink of ecological collapse, technology is not to blame. Quite the contrary — ​the machines, like the problems they solve, are most often a product of architecture itself.

The installation for the International Architecture Biennale in Venice embodies our contradictory attitude towards technology in a tangible and interactive way. At first sight, the tangle of black pipes looks like a foreign object that has overrun a human environment like a parasite. However, the installation urges passers-by to change their attitude and recognise a friendly neighbour in this seemingly frightening stranger, who responds to our presence and even addresses us in its own incomprehensible but reassuring language. This experience of coexistence between humans and man-made machines inspires us to create a sustainable partnership, simultaneously calling us to reassess the growing role of technology in contemporary architecture.

And if the current global health crisis has taught us anything, it is that when Mother Nature turns its back on us, technology turns from foe to friend. Cities are more than just clusters of buildings, and machines can bridge the connections interrupted by the “new normal”. Technology is a means to an end. What may have seemed only “for the building”, proves to be “for you” after all.

157

Connections interrupted

Connections interrupted In 2020, in response to the global health crisis, Latvia’s Venice Biennale pavilion was exhibited in a transformed form in Riga, Latvia. The installation “Connections Interrupted” is a play on the distance between individuals, households, cities and states that the pandemic has brought about. Having to work remotely and observe social distancing, people are forced to isolate themselves in their homes, where they maintain their connections with the rest of the world via technology. Physical ties have been replaced with digital signals. Severing the old connections has made our homes an unprecedented cluster of functions — ​our homes are now not only our private recreation areas, but also offices, schools, kindergartens, gyms, bars, restaurants and concert halls. Separated from the rest of the city, the living space has undergone social, functional and emotional saturation and is now cluttered. Although due to the pandemic our homes have become isolated from each other, like lonely islands, digital solutions have simultaneously made them transparent, by merging the boundaries between private and public space.

At the same time, the pandemic has served as a reminder of the well-known truth that cities are not just a collection of individual buildings, but of interconnections, and these have now been severed as a result of the spread of the Covid-19 virus. By the same token, nations are more than just clusters of cities, and the planet as a whole is more than a group of independent states. The global health crisis has forced us to find new ways to maintain this interconnected network, at least for the time being. Our streets have now become wires and our airports have become server complexes. By reversing our original concept for the installation, we want to illustrate the new role of technology during the pandemic, as it no longer focuses on a person living at home, but on the world outside.

The tangle of wires at the core of the installation embodies social, functional, emotional and technological oversaturation. The withdrawal, distancing and introversion that characterise the pandemic are symbolised by the fragile frame surrounding the archetypal form of the house. Equipped with motion sensors, the ball of wires responds to visitors and passers-by, sending light signals in their direction.

158

159

Connections Interrupted (Riga)

Contributions by: Daniel Barber (130) Andra Blumberga (106) Edmunds Cepurītis (56) David Heymann (8, 62) Anete Konste (50) Ervīns Krauklis (28) Elīna Lībiete (142) Marta Elīna Martinsone (36) Mārtiņš Mintaurs (100) Aija Rūse (90) Maha Salman (120) Jeļena Solovjova (44) Ēriks Stendzenieks (134) Artis Svece (112) Peter Trummer (20) Rvīns Varde (82) Vents Vīnbergs (74)

Edited and curated by: NRJA (Uldis Lukševics, Elīna Lībiete, Ivars Veinbergs, Ieva LāceLukševica, Zigmārs Jauja, Inga Dubinska, Līga Jumburga) Levelup (Igors Gubenko, Olga Procevska, Jekaterina Firjane)

Commissioner: Jānis Dripe

Proofread by: Will Mawhood

Our thanks for support and cooperation to the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Latvia. © 2021 the authors © 2021 NRJA ISBN 978-9934-23-116-2 latvianpavilion2021.lv

Graphic design by: Alexey Murashko Illustrations by: Ivars Veinbergs Translated by: Raxti (Mārtiņš Sīlis, Oskars Jansons)

Edition is set in Suisse Works and Suisse Int’l designed by Ian Party (Swiss Typefaces), Digestive by Jérémy Landes (Studio Triple), and Arnold by Philipp Neumeyer. The cover plate is set in Helvetica

by Max Miedinger and Eduard Hoffmann.

Printed and assembled by hand by Jelgavas tipogrāfija. Paper: Munken Polar 120 and 300 gsm produced by Arctic Paper.

ve ha s nd ize ne a an hi es m es ac liv hu ac lly M y e sp s, a r. da d e ed du g t. fa y ey th e ra in i o er h m n g ss w to ev o. T fro our nd tne kno ne ur er s ve y a wi we go o z u r c e s ver to ate se den e’r as ha l o acy ien to en W rld gy ro iv al ed ep ts. o lo nt pr d gn r d an n w no co ur an si ou rv ma ch ed d o ure De er se hu Te in ce ct it. st eir e ga du ite ab fo th f th re ch nh es to o ar e i hin in se w ac us lap m rn ol tu e c th

T on ech n ly n fig ew do olo H ht le m gy bu um ag ve ac im of t t an a l: th hi p fe m he re ins e ne rov ar ac p s t p y a s e s h ai ist o re ta s o an in n a ll a ke u d es of nc uti ls o r l en fa g e on o ur ive su r o row to n a ou co s re ut th e nd r m m big a we . T w t cl ai fo ti be ig h ec im n rt m tte h e o hn at all to e! r f ma bv ol e c ies a w No ut n io og ha in h t ur kin us y n t ol e d b is ge he e fo ’s e no . r h ir ne th um rat fit in an ion s g ity al .

Through essays, short stories, experts’ commentary and drawings, It’s not for you! It’s for the building explores human resistance to technology. By presenting instances of unsettling techno-nonsense, the book highlights the importance of the human perspective in architecture and helps people learn to live together with today’s intelligent machines in a world facing an environmental crisis.

ISBN 978-9934-23-116-2